Six billion after a job interview. Binance published its initial report on the October 29 hack on Tuesday, November 3. And the story of this Binance hack starts very far from the servers. An engineer responds to a job posting and uploads a code “exercise”. A few weeks later, 6.34 billion dollars left the platform's hot wallets.
The platform ensures that it absorbs the loss alone. As of October 31, 98% of affected assets had been reconstituted and $2.85 billion had been frozen or intercepted.
Key Points
Two engineers trapped upstream, one by a tampered with Homebrew installation in June and the other by a bogus recruitment in September.
An internal AI tool allowed hackers to jump from post to post to the wallet signing service.
EIP-7702 delegations registered on-chain continued to empty a wallet despite the suspension of withdrawals.
Binance Hack: fake recruiters and a tricked Homebrew
It all starts in June. An engineer from the Wallet DevOps team searches for an AI coding tool on a search engine. He then came across a tampered version of Homebrew, the package manager for developers on Mac. Binance security identifies the anomaly, replaces the machine and changes all its identifiers.
But too late for the most part. Hackers now know his role, and those of his colleagues in the wallet infrastructure.
The second act takes place in September on a very legitimate employment platform. Another engineer, whose profile mentions Binance, is approached by a supposed project director. Follows a first video interview with a recruiter. To build trust, she even shares her social network account, including personal photos and videos. Then the second round takes place on a general public messaging service, facing the so-called CEO of a fictitious company. Finally, he is asked to download an “assignment” onto his work computer.
The code repository contains zero-day malware, unknown to antiviruses at that time. In particular, it replaces pyenv, a Python tool, with a trapped version which communicates with an attacker's server. However, no protection installed on the station flinches.
“Our investigation indicates that this was a sophisticated campaign, carried out in several stages. This was neither an isolated intrusion nor a simple phishing incident.”
Binance, initial report of November 3, 2026
Binance says it has thwarted 57 hack attempts linked to North Korea in 2026. The 58th, however, passed.
Binance’s internal AI tool served as a springboard
Pirates kick into high gear on October 20. From the compromised computer, they hijack an internal Binance AI tool to take control of two other machines. Among them, that of the DevOps engineer targeted in June. Above all, they find an authorization token to deploy containers.
On October 29, from 6:15 p.m. to 8:56 p.m., they connect to a third engineer's station, deploy a container and launch their script. This then opens access to the internal service which signs wallet transactions, outside the normal withdrawal circuit.
Then everything goes very quickly. Five hot wallets send 233.46 million XRP to an attackers' address between 9:05 p.m. and 9:09 p.m. Paris time. Also followed are approximately 970,500 SOL, 44.2 million OP on Optimism and 18,270 BTC.
Binance's report on the hack does not name the AI tool in question. The platform only indicates that it has rebuilt it, with its access controls, and also promises a research fund on the security of AI in the blockchain.
Why cutting withdrawals was not enough against EIP-7702
Binance suspends withdrawals upon internal alert. However, the bleeding continues on the Ethereum side.
Hackers used the signature service to exploit EIP-7702, which arrived with the Pectra update in May 2025. This mechanism allows a classic account to entrust part of its powers to a smart contract, with the private key remaining out of reach. With 50 signed transactions, the attackers first manipulate the wallet's nonce (its transaction counter). They then entrust partial rights to a Binance hot wallet to their own contract.
However, these authorizations live on the blockchain. Closing withdrawals on the platform side therefore does not cancel them.
Because the hot wallet relied on the MPC, there was no unique private key to immediately revoke malicious EIP-7702 permissions. The team therefore had to design and execute a specific procedure, which required additional time.
Binance, initial report of November 3, 2026
MPC (multi-party calculation) distributes the key among several parties. This protects against the theft of a single key, but slows down the response in an emergency. The last transfer of 2,961.9 ETH was thus not finalized until 12:56 a.m. Paris time. The delegation was not cleared until 1:10 a.m. on October 30, according to the report published by Binance on X.
The FBI attributes the attack to TraderTraitor. This North Korean unit was already accused by Washington of the theft of $1.5 billion from Bybit in February 2025. Binance, for its part, ordered an independent audit of the hack.
