Binance hack: questions about “the heist of the century” involving $6 billion in cryptos

This seems to many to be the “heist of the century”. Thursday, October 29 at 9:05 p.m. Paris time, hackers stole $6.3 billion (5.56 billion euros) from Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange platform in the world. The bulk of the theft took place in about 20 minutes and had similarities to previous attacks attributed to North Korea, according to blockchain analysis firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis.

In the process, Binance, which claims 335 million users worldwide and around $162 billion in assets on deposit in 2025, suspended withdrawals.

Is this a “classic” crypto hack, like those seen in the past?

Cryptocurrencies are based on a technology called “blockchain”: a digital ledger that stores the history of transactions and whose design makes falsification very difficult. Thus, “it was not this cryptography that failed, it was the operational security chain around it. The available elements point to the compromise of an engineering position,” explains Frédéric Ocana, crypto and cybersecurity expert. From there, this would have allowed a hacker to access one of its systems and make unauthorized withdrawals, Binance said according to the first elements of the investigation.

On a technical level, however, the attack marks a turning point. Hackers compromised key infrastructures and exploited an update, that of “Ethereum EIP-7702”. This allowed them to simultaneously siphon Binance wallets across 10 different blockchains (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, XRP Ledger, Solana, etc.), automating thousands of micro-transactions in just a few minutes to get ahead of alert systems, explains TRM Labs.

In the history of crypto hacks, “each added layer has had its generation of flaws: smart contracts, then the bridges between blockchains, among the most lucrative targets, and now the infrastructure of centralized actors. Code audits have become more professional, but an audit only covers the code. The attack we are talking about here has significantly less perspective and proven standards,” explains Frédéric Ocana. And to emphasize:

It is also unprecedented in terms of the industry's response. In less than an hour, an alliance between stablecoin issuers (Tether and Circle), security experts and law enforcement made it possible to freeze around $3 billion. This is the first time that such a digital sum has been “blocked” remotely live, limiting the hacker's final net loot to approximately $3.3 billion.

Machine-translated from French