Binance names new CFO days after $6.3 billion cryptocurrency hack

Binance has appointed Justin Yek as chief financial officer, replacing Kaiser Ng after more than five years in the role. The announcement came nine days after hackers stole approximately $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency from the exchange on October 29, in what is believed to be the largest digital asset theft on record. Binance co-CEO He Yi said Ng is leaving to pursue a new venture and that a transition plan had been implemented over the last half year. A Binance spokesperson confirmed to Fox Business that the leadership change was planned more than six months ago and had no connection to the security incident.

Yek most recently served as vice president of finance at global payments firm Airwallex, a role announced in February 2023, and previously worked at Morgan Stanley and Citi. He told Fox Business he was grateful for Ng's partnership during the transition over the past several months and looked forward to leading the finance organization as Binance continues to scale responsibly.

The FBI has attributed the October 29 attack to North Korean hackers associated with an operation known as "TraderTraitor." According to Binance, the hackers used a fraudulent job interview to compromise a DevOps engineer's laptop, then accessed an internal withdrawal service and exploited an artificial intelligence tool to execute unauthorized transactions across multiple blockchains including XRP Ledger, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and TRON. The theft took about twenty minutes and included roughly $3.8 billion in ether, 18,270 bitcoins valued at $1.5 billion, and 628 million in TRON.

Binance has pledged to absorb the losses rather than pass them to customers. Co-CEO Richard Teng told Fox Business that customers would not bear any losses and that the exchange had replenished affected assets. In a November 3 update, Binance said it had replenished 98% of affected token assets and that approximately $2.85 billion in stolen assets had been frozen or intercepted with help from industry partners including Tether and Circle. Withdrawals reopened on November 1 across 15 networks. The exchange said it found no trace of private key leaks and is working with law enforcement to trace remaining funds while bolstering cybersecurity defenses.