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Binance co-CEO Richard Teng addressed the public for the first time Tuesday following a historic cyber theft exceeding $6 billion, confirming the company is absorbing 100% of the losses with no customer balances compromised.
“First of all, this should not have happened, and we apologize to our users for the disruption,” Teng told FOX Business national correspondent Darren Botelho on “Varney & Co.” “This is a highly sophisticated multi-month campaign and the FBI has attributed it to North Korea. They use a combination of fake recruitment interviews, malicious software disguised as developer tools, AI techniques to work their way in and then execute that at a speed our industry has never seen before. We have since then closed all the different entry points, rebuilt the affected system, and we just published a detailed report so that industry can learn from that.”
When asked whether Binance customers lost any of their money or investments, Teng responded: “No, not at all… Our company, we bear full responsibility.”
EXPERT WARNS OF ‘AI HACKING BLOODBATH’ FOLLOWING MASSIVE BINANCE CRYPTOCURRENCY HACK
“The full financial impact will be borne by us. Users are not compromised,” Teng elaborated. “We have set aside more than 100% of the amount, right? And 98% of impacted assets have been replenished. Customers can verify their balance through our proof of reserve. The remaining assets, the 2%, they belong to less-liquid tokens, and we need some time to procure them without affecting market functioning, and those are being procured.”
The FBI said Saturday that North Korean hackers were responsible for stealing more than $6 billion in cryptocurrency from Binance last week, linking one of the largest digital asset thefts in history to the regime in Pyongyang.
The FBI said it and its partners at the U.S. Secret Service and IRS Criminal Investigation observed the hackers converting stolen assets primarily into Ether (ETH). Authorities also said they expect the assets to be further laundered through decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms and instant cryptocurrency exchange services.
With public records indicating the exchange maintains approximately $171 billion in total reserve backing, the enterprise utilized internal emergency facilities to absorb the more than $6 billion drain. Following an initial 24-hour surge in withdrawal requests upon reopening, platform flows have returned to standard volumes, according to Teng.
“We have set up very dedicated user protection reserves, like our SAFU fund, things like our futures insurance funds, and this has been built up progressively through the years, catered precisely for such [an] extreme scenario that we saw,” Teng said.
“And this is why financial strength matters. Many platforms would not have survived an episode such as this. But we are out there, we are now operating, we are protecting every user, and we’re extremely grateful for our users’ confidence and trust in us,” he added. “By now, you look at the hourly inflow and outflows, they’re pretty much normalized, and it’s pretty much business as usual for us now.”
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FOX Business’ Michael Sinkewicz contributed to this report.
