In what could be the largest hack in history, Binance, the cryptocurrency giant, has announced that $6.3 billion worth of digital assets were impacted through an attack.

Around half of those assets have been frozen, the crypto exchange said.

Richard Teng, Binance Co-CEO, said on X that “our initial investigation suggests this security incident may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop. That gave an attacker access to a service container, where they submitted unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”

He went on to say that the attacker did not simply use one engineer's permissions, and this was not a single "one-click" action. “It involved a more complex attack process. Our investigation has not attributed responsibility to any individual. So far, we have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak.”

He said the company will cover all losses and that deposits are unaffected

Binance told the BBC that it is working closely with law enforcement partners to confirm the identity of the criminals.

BBC quotes TRM Labs, an AI-powered investigations company, as saying that several elements of the attack resemble earlier North-Korean linked incidents. Another crypto analytics firm, Chainalysis, said it has high confidence that a North Korean Group is linked.

The regime denied involvement in hacks in the past.

Co-Chief Executive of Binance Yi He thanked cryptocurrency issuers for freezing the assets.

Binance, founded in China back in 2017, has more than 300 million users registered worldwide.