Trump says US looking into Binance hack: ‘We don’t know’ if North Korea responsible

President Trump said Friday his administration is looking into the $6.3 billion hacking of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, the largest such hack on record.

“We don’t know,” Trump said in the Oval Office when asked if the hack should be attributed to a suspected North Korean hacker group.

TraderTraitor, a North Korea-based cybercrime group, appears to be behind the Binance hacking, according to TRM Labs and Chainalysis, two blockchain intelligence firms.

The money began moving out of Binance wallets Thursday afternoon. The company moved to suspend all deposits and withdrawals, while crypto firms froze some $3 billion in assets tied to the incident.

The attacker moved the money out of the wallets on XRP Ledger, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron, Solana and several other blockchain networks. Much of it occurred over a 20-minute span, TRM Labs said.

“It’s a hack,” Trump said. “That’s the problem. You know the old-fashioned way when you used to sign a check … these are different people, never see the money anymore. So I’ve always felt it was a little bit dangerous.”

“They say they have it pretty much under control,” he added. “We’ll see.”

TRM Labs noted that several aspects of the Binance hack match earlier North Korea-linked incidents, such as the $1.5 billion hack of crypto exchange Bybit last year.

Binance has said it will cover all the losses associated with the incident.

“Difficult times like this are a great reminder of how strong our industry is when we work together,” Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said in a video posted to the social platform X. “We are grateful to our partners that acted quickly to freeze their assets, to global law enforcement who we are working with hand-in-hand to seek justice.”

“But most of all, we are grateful to our users for their patience and understanding,” he continued. “Rest assured that we are working nonstop to resolve this, to make the users whole and live up to their trust.”