The same week that Europe, Japan and the United Kingdom urged their citizens to prepare for a kind of looming apocalypse, by stockpiling water, food and cash for a period of three to ten days, the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform, Binance, lost about 6.3 billion dollars in less than four hours.
Security agencies, especially the FBI in the United States, attributed the theft to cybercriminals who may be connected to the North Korean government. It should be noted, however, that no one has shown a causal link between the two stories, nor is it possible to state the origin of the attack with certainty. What they do share is the same diagnosis: the systems we depend on can fail, and no government denies it or tries to hide it anymore.
The largest theft in cryptocurrency history
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and controls about 35% of the market. Among other functions, it holds its customers’ funds in digital wallets that it manages and processes withdrawals from a few of them that remain connected to the internet, in other words, cloud spaces we believed were secure for storing the unique codes of cryptocurrencies, a service used by millions of people around the world. However, that whole illusion of security collapsed on the night of Thursday, October 29, between nine in the evening and one in the morning Central European Time, when Binance’s withdrawal system signed outflows of money from 17 of those wallets without the owners’ authorization. According to the data company Bitquery, the attacker moved about 6.3 billion dollars in under four hours and spread it across nine different blockchains, effectively shattering the trail across the network.
The way in was a laptop.
Binance’s preliminary investigation points to the compromised computer of an operations engineer at the company itself, which may have allowed the attacker to enter a service container and send unauthorized withdrawal orders. In other words, an employee could be involved, although it is not yet possible to determine whether this was intentional or whether the device was breached by the attackers without the employee noticing. What is certain is that the company stated that no private keys were leaked and that the attack had several fronts.
The stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, that is, the companies that back cryptocurrencies pegged to the value of the dollar, froze about 2.4 billion dollars as soon as they detected the movement, while Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals for about 45 hours, promised to cover all losses with its own funds and by Saturday had already restored around 90% of the affected money. Even so, the blow is four times larger than the 1.5 billion stolen from Bybit in February 2025, which until this week was the largest cryptocurrency theft on record.
North Korea and the hacking business
The blockchain analytics firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis, the companies that track money moving through blockchains, attributed the attack with high confidence to TraderTraitor, a hacking unit that, according to U.S. security agencies, works for the North Korean state and is believed to be linked to the Lazarus Group. It was not until Saturday, October 31, however, that the FBI officially confirmed the attribution and warned that the attackers were already converting the stolen funds into Ethereum, a cryptocurrency different from Bitcoin that uses other encryption codes, as a strategy to launder the money through platforms without intermediaries, in other words, automated exchange services that are very difficult for any authority to trace.
Stealing cryptocurrency is state policy in Pyongyang.
According to Chainalysis estimates, North Korean hackers stole 1.34 billion dollars in 2024 and 2.02 billion in 2025, about 60% of all cryptocurrency crime recorded worldwide that year, with a cumulative haul since 2016 of around 6.75 billion. This means that the Binance heist alone nearly equals a full decade of thefts. And although the United Nations and several governments, including the United States, have argued for years that this money funds the regime’s nuclear and missile programs, I personally believe there is a paradox here that is hard to digest: a country with chronic food shortages ends up financing itself with the digital wealth of investors around the planet, while an industry that prides itself on decentralization depends on two private issuers freezing funds in time.
Three days of water and food
On October 22, the British Cabinet Office, the department that coordinates the work of government ministries from Downing Street, launched the “Be Ready” campaign, which according to the government itself will run for three years and asks every household to keep, for 72 hours, three liters of water per person per day, food that requires no cooking, a flashlight, a radio, a power bank and cash in case electronic payment systems fail. The campaign’s official message states that “from extreme weather to cyber attacks, emergencies can disrupt the services we rely on; being prepared for three days helps us cope while help reaches those who need it most,” to which Defence Secretary Wes Streeting added that businesses could suffer cyberattacks capable of bringing down entire supply chains.
Five days later, Japan’s Minister for Disaster Management, Goshi Hosono, announced that on November 2, with the launch of the new national disaster agency, he would ask all households to store at least three days of water and food, plus hygiene supplies, and a week if possible. This is a country that has spent years preparing for a megaquake in the Nankai Trough and a possible eruption of Mount Fuji, so in this case the motivation is seismic and volcanic and has nothing to do with cybersecurity.
Europe has been moving in the same direction for more than a year.
Since March 2025, the European Commission has asked that every citizen be able to sustain themselves for 72 hours on their own, Germany recommends up to ten days, and the French region of Normandy repeated the call this week with a rather blunt message: don’t wait for the emergency, prepare now. Meanwhile, in the United States, the official Ready.gov website speaks of “several days,” and at the end of September the Pentagon ordered its military bases to be able to operate for up to 90 days without outside supplies, which is where the figure we mentioned at the beginning comes from.
Is there a connection between the two stories?
The short answer is that there is no evidence of a direct link, and the timeline itself rules it out: the British campaign came out a week before the theft, Japan made its announcement two days earlier, the European strategy is more than a year old, and the Pentagon issued its order at the end of September. In other words, no government or serious source has connected the two events. They do, however, share a context worth looking at closely. October 2026 is already known in the industry as “Black October,” because on October 21 two critical flaws in PHP, the programming language that powers about 70% of the world’s websites, forced European government sites, Wikipedia, the Steam video game store and educational platforms offline. Researchers found these flaws with the help of artificial intelligence models from OpenAI and the firm Wiz, which opens another debate about the role of AI in hunting for vulnerabilities.
The British government used that outage as an argument.
The “Be Ready” campaign was published the day after the PHP crisis, and London said the disruption showed why it was needed. The Binance theft came eight days later and closed the month with proof that an allegedly state-backed actor can penetrate the best-funded private infrastructure on the planet. Nor is this the first time North Korea has hit essential services: in 2017, the WannaCry malware, which the United States and the United Kingdom attributed to Pyongyang, paralyzed British hospitals for several days.
The common thread here is a change in doctrine. States have stopped promising continuity of services and now ask households to absorb the first 72 hours of any collapse, whether it comes from an earthquake, a storm, an eruption or a cyberattack. The sociologist Ulrich Beck described this four decades ago as the risk society, one in which the threats we ourselves produce exceed the ability of institutions to control them. Calls to stockpile turn that idea into public policy, and Binance users lived their own version of it, with 45 hours unable to touch their money.
What this means for Latin America
Although in Latin America, since the Cold War, we have perceived the risk of a global war as something distant that only happens in the Global North, the reality is that countries such as Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico appear on the map of countries with official preparedness recommendations, meaning they are not exempt from the effects of a possible apocalypse. According to a Newsweek article published this week, the high risk of earthquakes and floods makes these precautions all the more sensible. At the same time, the region is one of the heaviest users of Binance for keeping savings in stablecoins as a response to inflation and currency controls, so a two-day freeze weighs very differently in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Bogotá or Mexico City than in London. In addition, our governments very likely have less fiscal capacity to respond to a service crisis and certainly less leverage to hold accountable a company with no fixed headquarters. The theft therefore reopens a question that Latin American authorities rarely ask themselves, and it is no small matter: who protects citizens’ digital money when the platform holding it is beyond any local jurisdiction?
In summary, the Binance theft and the calls to store water and food lack a demonstrable common cause, and yet they describe the same world: one in which a pariah state allegedly emptied the largest wallet on the internet in four hours, while the richest governments on the planet admit they cannot guarantee electricity, water, internet or electronic payments during the first 72 hours of a crisis. Preparing seems sensible, but the underlying question is who pays the bill when the system fails, and for now, we all do.
References
- (2026, October 30). How the Binance hack happened and who was behind it. https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/30/how-the-binance-hack-happened-and-who-was-behind-it
- (2026, November 1). FBI blames North Korea for $6.3 billion Binance crypto hack. https://www.euronews.com/2026/11/01/fbi-blames-north-korea-for-63-billion-binance-crypto-hack
- (2026, October 31). A simple explainer of the massive $6.3 billion crypto heist at Binance. https://www.npr.org/2026/10/31/nx-s1-6024426/binance-crypto-heist-cyber-criminals-north-korea
- Gulf News. (2026, October 30). Binance hack: Lazarus group suspected as $6.3b theft rattles traders. https://gulfnews.com/videos/business-video/binance-hack-lazarus-group-suspected-as-63b-rattles-traders-1.500729615
- NBC News. (2025, December 18). North Korea stole billions in crypto in 2025, new research says. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna249738
- Seoul Economic Daily. (2026, October 27). Japan to urge citizens to stockpile three days of food, water. https://en.sedaily.com/international/2026/10/27/japan-to-urge-citizens-to-stockpile-three-days-of-food-water
- (2026, October 29). Map shows nations urging people to stockpile food as France issues warning. https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-countries-urging-residents-to-stockpile-food-12629524
- Sky News / Radio X. (2026, October 22). “Be Ready” campaign urges Britons to stock up to survive “extreme weather and cyber attacks”. https://www.radiox.co.uk/news/uk-world/government-launches-new-push-to-prepare-uk-fo/
- International Business Times UK. (2026, October). UK government emergency preparedness guidance urges supplies for disruptions including cyberattacks. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/uk-households-prepare-three-days-disruption-1827455
- (2026, October). PHP-ocalypse: How two critical web bugs almost broke the internet. https://techcrunch.com/?p=3181497
- Al Jazeera. (2026, October 22). What is the PHP coding flaw that could pull down 70 percent of the internet? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/22/whats-the-php-coding-flaw-that-could-pull-down-70-percent-of-the-internet
- European Commission. (2025, March 26). Preparedness Union Strategy. Brussels: European Commission.
- Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage.
