U.S. bank regulators reached out to banks this week to determine whether their systems contained any vulnerabilities following last week's $6.3 billion hack of Binance, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing several people familiar with the matter.

Supervisors from the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) began contacting banks on Monday morning, inquiring about any unusual activity or disruptions to their services.

The outreach signals that regulators are treating the largest crypto theft on record as a potential risk to traditional finance — not merely a problem confined to crypto exchanges — at a time when ties between banks and the crypto industry have grown closer.

Banks Run Diagnostics

A source at one bank contacted by regulators told Reuters that its services had experienced no disruptions. Staff prepared talking points for customers, though few inquiries have come in since.

Banks have been studying the attack and running diagnostics on their own systems to confirm they could withstand a similar assault, two people familiar with the efforts said.

Within hours of the hack, a cybersecurity team at one of the largest U.S. banks contacted counterparts at Binance. That team is preparing an internal report that will lead to a review of the bank's systems and potentially cybersecurity updates. It remained unclear whether the bank could be vulnerable to the same tactics.

The biggest worry, one person said, is that artificial intelligence models are evolving rapidly, making it difficult for banks to keep pace with hackers. Banks are devoting substantial resources to reviewing and patching their cybersecurity code.

Binance said it was not aware of conversations between banks and regulators, or of whether the hack had any impact on U.S. banks.

"We are in close contact with regulators all over the world, keeping them up to date on this security breach," a Binance spokesperson said.

How the Binance Hack Worked

The concern about AI mirrors the way the attack unfolded. According to Binance, the theft began with a fake job interview and ran for five months before any coins moved. The operation combined a poisoned software download, a staged recruitment process, malware capable of evading endpoint detection, and an internal AI tool that the attackers turned against the company's own wallet engineers.

Funds began leaving Binance's hot wallets across multiple blockchains on Oct. 29. Blockchain analysis firms Chainalysis and TRM Labs attributed the hack to TraderTraitor, a unit associated with North Korea. U.S. agencies have tracked TraderTraitor since 2022, when they warned that the group used fabricated job offers to deliver malware to crypto industry employees — the same opening Binance described. U.S. officials have also repeatedly said stolen cryptocurrency helps fund North Korea's weapons programs.

The $6.3 billion taken far exceeds the previous record for a crypto theft — the roughly $1.5 billion drained from exchange Bybit in February 2025.

Binance reopened withdrawals in stages four days later, beginning with bitcoin. The exchange has said it froze or intercepted roughly $2.85 billion of the stolen assets and replenished 98% of affected tokens from its own funds.

None of the techniques Binance described are unique to crypto. Social engineering, malicious downloads, and compromised internal tools are risks every large financial institution faces — which helps explain why bank cybersecurity teams moved within hours.

Closer Ties, Closer Scrutiny

The checks follow a year and a half of U.S. regulators clearing the way for banks to expand their crypto activities. In March 2025, the OCC rescinded its requirement that national banks obtain supervisory nonobjection before taking on crypto custody and stablecoin activities. The Fed withdrew its own guidance the following month, which had required state member banks to notify it before starting crypto activities.

As more banks custody bitcoin, issue stablecoins, and serve exchanges, a breach at a major crypto platform becomes a question for bank supervisors as well.

Traditional lenders are not immune to large-scale thefts of their own. French bank Credit Mutuel Arkea confirmed on Wednesday a cyberattack that enabled fraudulent transfers from its own account — a theft that an on-chain investigator has put at more than $133 million. The bank has not confirmed that figure and said customer assets were not affected.

Neither the Fed nor the OCC has publicly announced any new guidance tied to the Binance hack, and it is unclear whether the current outreach will develop into formal rules. For now, the response in motion is coming from the banks themselves, in the form of internal reviews that could lead to cybersecurity updates.

This article first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Micah Zimmerman.