Regulators Phone US Banks After Binance's $6.3B Hack, Reuters Says

Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency officials reportedly started ringing US banks on Monday, asking whether they had seen "unusual activity" or service disruptions. Reuters reported the calls Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter, and tied them directly to last week's $6.3 billion Binance hack.

Binance's own accounting of the damage landed in a Nov. 3 incident report. Roughly $6.34 billion in digital assets were affected by the Oct. 29 attack, with $2.85 billion frozen or intercepted as of that filing. The exchange traced the opening to compromised software an engineer installed back in June, followed by social engineering, stolen credentials and malicious tools that cracked into wallet systems.

Stefan Muehlbauer, head of US government affairs at CertiK, told Cointelegraph the regulator check-ins could soon turn into harder looks at custody, counterparty exposure and incident response. "After an incident of this scale, it would be surprising if the Fed and OCC didn't check in with the banks they supervise," he said. Muehlbauer called the process how a maturing framework should work, not a sign regulators are retreating.

Banks aren't waiting around. According to Reuters, they've been sizing up the hack and testing whether their own systems could absorb something similar — and a cybersecurity team at one of the largest US banks reached out to Binance within hours of the breach. A Binance spokesperson told Cointelegraph the exchange handed its publicly released incident report to all of its banking partners and isn't aware of any vulnerabilities affecting them.

The scrutiny arrives months after the Fed, in April 2025, scrapped a requirement that state member banks notify regulators before diving into crypto activities, saying it would keep watch through routine supervision. A Fed spokesperson told Cointelegraph there was nothing to share on the reported inquiries; the OCC hadn't responded at publication time.

Dr. Darren Williams, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm BlackFog, warned that the same playbook threatens traditional lenders, especially those handling crypto custody and payments. Attackers, he said, no longer need to crack encryption or steal private keys if they can compromise the trusted systems and people cleared to move money — and agentic AI in financial ops could widen the door. His fix: stop unauthorized transfers and data leaks before assets walk out, not after. Binance says it has since tightened its controls and brought in independent cybersecurity experts to review the attack.