Expert Warns of Coming 'AI Hacking Bloodbath' After Record Binance Theft
Cryptocurrency expert Eric Schiffer is warning that the worst wave of AI-enabled hacking has not yet arrived. "I think the bloodbath of AI hacking is to come," he said. "And there's going to be a lot more pain." His comments, reported by Fox Business, shift attention from the theft itself to the larger risk that artificial intelligence is making cyberattacks faster, cheaper and harder to stop.
Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, confirmed that hackers stole approximately $6.3 billion in digital assets and suspended withdrawals on multiple networks. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs calculated the loss at approximately $6.36 billion and called it the largest crypto theft on record. The previous record was the $1.5 billion taken from rival exchange Bybit in February 2025, also attributed to North Korea's TraderTraitor unit.
In a post on X, Binance said its initial investigation suggested a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer may have allowed an attacker to access a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. The company stressed that the attacker did not act through one engineer's permissions alone and that it was not a single one-click action. It said it had not found evidence of a leaked wallet private key, while a later investigation uncovered additional points of breach.
TRM Labs said it attributes the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking unit, with high confidence based on on-chain and off-chain intelligence. The firm said the attacker moved funds out of Binance wallets across ten blockchains, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron, the XRP Ledger, Solana, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, Base and Polygon, with most of the assets moved in roughly 20 minutes. President Donald Trump said on Friday his administration was investigating whether North Korean hackers were responsible.
Binance said it had reserved more than $6.34 billion in company funds to cover losses, including $5 billion already held in the same cryptocurrencies that were stolen, while buying additional tokens through the market. Binance reported about $3 billion frozen, while TRM Labs counted approximately $2.7 billion frozen as of 00:30 UTC on October 30. Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said the exchange will cover all losses, and co-founder Yi He said withdrawals were disabled while security teams secured the platform.
Schiffer said that for a company like Binance, whose balance sheet far exceeds the hit, it will recover, but the blow to credibility is painful and many asset holders doing business with it will leave. CBS News cited South Korea's spy agency as saying in December 2022 that North Korean hackers had stolen an estimated 1.5 trillion won, about $1.1 billion, in cryptocurrency and other virtual assets over five years, more than half of it in 2022 alone. The Binance haul is several times that total, underlining the scale of exposure for exchanges and ordinary users alike.
The immediate focus is whether Binance can complete security checks and restore withdrawals within 48 hours, and whether cooperation with law enforcement, stablecoin issuers and industry partners can freeze more assets. A U.S. Secret Service spokesperson said investigators are working around the clock with private-sector partners, including Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, to trace and recover the funds. Schiffer warned that businesses can no longer treat cybersecurity as a problem to fix after an attack.