Binance restores some withdrawals after $6.3 billion hack linked to North Korea

Binance has restarted withdrawals for some cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and ether, after a hack that the exchange put at about $6.3 billion. The attack was linked by some crypto-tracing firms to North Korean hackers known as TraderTraitor.

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, suspended all withdrawals after the breach. The exchange said it had frozen about $3 billion of affected assets, mainly stablecoins, which are digital tokens pegged to cash and used as a kind of money in the crypto market. Analysts at Elliptic said the attacker had converted roughly $3.3 billion into crypto holdings that could not be frozen, and was trying to cash them out into traditional currency.

Some crypto-tracing firms said the attack took about 20 minutes. They said billions of dollars in crypto may be gone for good.

Customers withdraw funds

When the exchange came back online, customers pulled out $3.64 billion, which amounted to 2.1 percent of its assets. Binance said it had covered 95% of the affected tokens, according to a later update.

The same update noted that $2.9 billion in cryptocurrency had been stolen across several incidents over the previous year.

What comes next

Binance said it would restore withdrawals for more assets in later phases. It has not said when each phase will start. It is not yet clear how much of the stolen money can be recovered.

For Indian users of Binance, withdrawals are back only for select coins, so anyone holding other assets will have to wait for later phases.