Binance Co-CEO Says $6.3B Theft Followed Months-Long Intrusion

Binance co-CEO Richard Teng linked a $6.3 billion theft to a months-long intrusion, saying an exchange engineer’s software installation gave hackers their initial foothold.

Teng said the breach began in June, when a wallet DevOps engineer installed a tampered version of Homebrew while searching online. He rejected claims that one compromised laptop was to blame.

Teng described the theft as a record $6.3 billion loss. In his account, the June installation preceded an extended effort by hackers to gain access to Binance. He presented that timeline as central to why a single-device explanation did not account for the incident.

His account describes a sequence: the engineer’s installation came first, followed by months of hackers working their way into Binance. The software installation was the starting point in Teng’s explanation, while the prolonged intrusion was his account of how the theft unfolded. He tied the $6.3 billion figure to that broader operation, rather than to a one-laptop incident.