Binance hack: US regulators check banks for disruption

US regulators have reportedly been contacting banks to look for unusual activity or disruptions after the $6.3 billion Binance hack. Officials from the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have been reaching out to banks to assess the impact, according to sources who spoke to Reuters.

One source whose bank was contacted said there were no disruptions to their services. That bank had prepared statements for customer inquiries. Another source said the rapid evolution of AI has forced banks to commit more resources to cybersecurity while they struggle to keep pace with hackers.

A cybersecurity team at one of the largest US banks contacted Binance after the hack, Reuters reported. The aim was to build an internal report reviewing the bank's own security systems.

Banks are also reportedly checking their own defences to see whether they could respond to a similar attack.

Binance was hacked on October 29 after a series of breaches targeting three employees. An engineer searching for a popular AI coding tool clicked a malicious search engine ad for an installation program, then downloaded a program carrying malware. Binance detected and dealt with that breach, but the engineer's details and those of his team had already leaked.

Three months later, a second engineer was tricked into a fake job interview and downloaded an "assignment" containing malicious code. That malware pulled sensitive information from the engineer. By October 29 it could log into a third engineer's computer and run the script behind the $6.3 billion hack.