Security
Binance traces $6.3bn heist to fake job interviews and malware
The exchange's incident report describes a months-long campaign that tricked engineers, abused an internal AI tool and drained hot wallets, with North Korea blamed.
Still
Crunchy. Wednesday, 4 November 2026
YESTERDAY, STILL WORTH KNOWING
Binance details a months-long hack that stole $6.34bn, French blood bank cold stores are hacked, US voters curb data centres, and Nothing teases a screen-free AI device.
Security breaches, from crypto to blood banks
Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange, has published its first incident report on the record $6.34bn theft from its hot wallets on 29 October, revealing a months-long campaign rather than a single breach. The FBI attributes the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group linked to Lazarus Group; Pyongyang has rejected the accusation, with Kim Yo-jong calling the US claims absurd rhetoric. The intrusion began in June, when a wallet infrastructure engineer downloaded a tampered copy of Homebrew, a package manager for macOS, after searching for an AI coding tool. In September, a second engineer was drawn in through a fake job interview on a legitimate platform and downloaded a coding assignment that was actually malware, which Binance says its endpoint security tools did not detect. On 29 October the attackers used stolen credentials and a container deployment token to reach the internal wallet signing service and trigger the theft, abusing Ethereum's EIP-7702 mechanism to gain partial execution rights over a hot wallet, so suspending withdrawals could not stop it. Binance says $2.85bn has been frozen or intercepted, down from about $3bn when the theft was first disclosed, and that it will absorb the losses, with 98% of affected tokens replenished.
Hackers also accessed control systems at three cold stores holding blood products run by contractors of France's national blood service, the EFS, pushing temperatures to very high levels overnight on Monday, though alarms let technicians intervene before any products were compromised. The EFS supplies blood, plasma and platelets to more than 1,900 hospitals. The attack appears to escalate a wider European campaign against internet-connected fridges and freezers, which last month hit as many as 700 French supermarkets; no motive is known. Separately, SecurityWeek reports at least a dozen AI developer platforms, including Chainstack and WorkOS, have been breached in the past month by attackers hunting stored customer secrets and AI access tokens to resell. Both companies said their attackers used Artex, an open source AI penetration testing framework, which multiple firms have linked to the Chinese hacking group Storm-0940. The attacks are not believed to be related.
Data centres and studio closures face resistance
US midterm voters reportedly backed 33 ballot measures restricting data centre development, with six more leading, in a setback for the Trump administration's AI push. The measures ranged from outright bans to pauses and limits on size or energy use, and polling cited in the reporting suggests 70% of Americans oppose AI data centre build-outs. There is a caveat: only three projects totalling 2.3 gigawatts have been delayed, and 38 gigawatts are still expected online by 2027.
The French games union STJV accuses Microsoft's Xbox of sabotaging Marvel's Blade at Arkane Lyon, the studio behind Dishonored, via a 19-month hiring ban, then citing the resulting delays to justify closure. Xbox has reportedly taken bids, with Ubisoft said to be interested; it has not responded.
AI devices and agents, measured and teased
Nothing, the consumer tech firm led by CEO Carl Pei, will launch its first AI device in December, revealing only that it has no screen. It joins a crowded field of screen-free AI experiments, including the Humane AI pin and a reported OpenAI smart speaker with Jony Ive.
Uber executives disclosed that third-party AI agents booked just four rides and around 500 Uber Eats orders in the week of Halloween, against 320 million total rides and deliveries. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said it is very, very early, and Uber is building its own AI to keep customers in-app.