AI-fueled hacking spree ‘Black October’ culminated with record Binance hack

The New York Post has reported that a run of high-profile cyberattacks, which it labelled 'Black October', culminated on Thursday with North Korean hackers stealing an estimated $6.3 billion from the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. On Saturday, the FBI confirmed that the TraderTraitor unit was responsible for the theft. The article presents the Binance incident as the final entry in a month-long sequence of breaches rather than as an isolated case.

Other targets named in the report include the Federal Election Commission, Sony, John Deere, Oracle Health, the State Bank of India and the open-source coding agent OpenCode. The list spans election administration, consumer electronics, agricultural machinery, health records, banking and open-source software. The $6.3 billion figure for the Binance theft is given as an estimate and is the largest sum cited in the article. The FBI's statement attributing the theft to TraderTraitor is dated to Saturday, two days after the theft itself.

The Post attributes the volume of the hacks to artificial intelligence models, which it says have drastically lowered the skill barrier for attackers. The report states that connection in terms of the overall number of incidents; it does not assign AI involvement to individual breaches on its list, and no loss figures are given for the other named targets. The piece is framed as a single spree running through the month, and the only perpetrators identified are the North Korean hackers named in connection with Binance.