GOOD LORD: Binance Suspends Transactions After It Is Targeted in Biggest-Ever Cyber Heist.

Binance suspended transactions Thursday as the exchange investigates the biggest cyber heist in history.

“It does look like a hack on Binance,” Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder, said in a post on the social-media platform X. “User funds are safe.”

Binance said late Thursday that the hack totaled around $6.3 billion.

Zhao, who no longer leads the world’s biggest crypto exchange but remains its largest shareholder, added that stablecoin providers Tether and Circle had moved quickly to freeze some $1.7 billion in stolen assets. Binance later revised that number to $3 billion across several different assets.

Cybersecurity research firms TRM Labs and Pangolin Intelligence said the heist appears to have been conducted by North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacking group, which has been behind many of the largest crypto hacks in recent memory. “This was absolutely North Korea,” said Nick Carlsen, a senior investigator on the Global Investigations team at TRM, who told the Journal he worked with Pangolin Intelligence to correlate hackers’ blockchain activity with information they gathered on other DPRK-linked attacks.

Binance said it has suspended all deposits and withdrawals as its team conducts security checks, freezes funds and works with law enforcement.

I had been assured that blockchain simply couldn’t be hacked.