On October 29, 2026, hackers took about $6.3 billion from Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, most of it in about 20 minutes. Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs called it the largest theft in crypto history, about four times the $1.5 billion stolen from the exchange Bybit in February 2025. Two days later, the FBI attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking group.

On the night of November 1, another cyberattack raised the temperature of fridges and freezers in more than 100 supermarkets across at least six European countries, some to 50°C. It was the second such wave in a month, after hundreds of French supermarkets were breached in October.

Both attacks began with weak points that are common across industries. Binance’s investigation started with an engineer’s compromised laptop. The supermarket hackers got in through refrigeration controllers that were reachable over the internet, many of them running outdated software.

As more of the economy runs on connected systems, attacks like these are turning cybersecurity into a strategic sector for companies and governments alike. Worldwide spending on information security is forecast to reach $240 billion in 2026, up 12.5% from 2025, according to Gartner. The research firm names rising threats, the spread of AI, and regulatory pressure among the reasons.

The Binance theft

Binance co-CEO Richard Teng described a “complex attack” involving a compromised laptop and malicious software designed to delete evidence of the attackers’ activity. The hackers manipulated the system that approves transactions, so money left Binance’s internet-connected wallets without passing the normal controls. The funds were then moved across ten blockchains.

Stablecoins, digital tokens usually pegged to the U.S. dollar, are issued by companies that can freeze them. Within hours, those issuers and others froze nearly $2.7 billion, according to TRM Labs. By November 2, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic put the total frozen or seized at about $2.9 billion. However, the remaining stolen assets were mostly in bitcoin and ether, which have no issuer that could freeze them.

Binance set aside about $6.34 billion of its own money to cover the losses, far more than the $1 billion it keeps in a bitcoin reserve to protect customers after security breaches. Teng wrote on X: “Rest assured that we are working nonstop to resolve this, to make the users whole, and live up to your trust.” By November 5, the exchange said it had replaced about 98% of the stolen assets. When withdrawals reopened on November 1, customers took out a net $3.64 billion in the first nine and a half hours—2.1% of the $171 billion Binance holds for them, The Block reported.

North Korea has stolen about $12.8 billion in crypto since 2017, including $7.4 billion this year, according to TRM Labs. It accounts for 85% of the value lost to crypto hacks in 2026.

Supermarket freezers

The first attack hit France on the night of October 11. Hackers reached the refrigeration controls of at least 300 Intermarché and Netto stores, more than 100 Coopérative U outlets, and 80 Carrefour supermarkets, among others. Freezers that normally run at around minus 18°C were pushed as high as 50°C. Fires broke out at several stores. Intermarché Chief Executive Thierry Cotillard put the losses at “tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day.”

The second wave, overnight into November 2, hit stores in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Sweden, with problems also reported in Finland, Italy, and Portugal. The same day, a refrigeration contractor working for France’s blood service was also attacked. Alarms at three blood bank sites caught the temperature spikes before any blood products were damaged. Christophe Hansen, the European commissioner for agriculture and food, said: “The repeated occurrence of these cyberattacks is deeply concerning.” He added that food security was not at risk, but “the food waste and impact on businesses are real.”

The hackers went after refrigeration controllers that could be reached from the internet, many of them made by the Danish company Danfoss. Danfoss said most of the units hit in France were older models that it no longer updates. Some still used factory-default passwords, according to SecurityWeek and The Hacker News. Danfoss told customers on October 13 to take the controllers off the internet. A company spokesperson later said: “Most stores took action at that time, but a small number did not.” Two pro-Russian groups claimed the November wave on Telegram, but security experts questioned the claim. On November 9, France blamed the October attack on Shahid Kaveh, a cyber unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and Paris prosecutors requested international arrest warrants for its leaders. The French findings do not cover the November wave. Belgium’s federal prosecutor has opened an investigation.

Exposed industries

The vulnerability behind the supermarket attacks is common far beyond retail. Operational technology, the equipment that controls physical processes, also runs factories, power plants, hospitals, and warehouses. John Billow, head of Sweden’s National Cybersecurity Centre, said the center had found “quite a lot of exposed operational technology devices in Sweden” that can be reached from the internet and need patching. Citing four officials, Reuters reported that the Pentagon is treating refrigeration failures at U.S. military sites in Arizona and Rhode Island in August 2026 as a suspected hack. A 2025 report by industrial security firm Dragos estimated that cyber incidents disrupting such systems could have a global financial impact of about $330 billion, with business interruption alone accounting for more than $172 billion.

Hacking can also hurt companies that were not the target. A cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover in August 2025 stopped its assembly lines for more than a month. The United Kingdom’s Cyber Monitoring Centre estimated the cost to the British economy at about £1.9 billion and called it the most economically damaging cyber event ever to hit the country. More than 5,000 other organizations along the carmaker’s supply chain were affected. Ciaran Martin, chair of the center’s technical committee and former head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, said: “Every organisation needs to identify the networks that matter to them.”

A strategic sector

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu ordered the national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, to investigate the October wave. After the second wave, the European Commission convened a crisis meeting with the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA and Europol. In Washington, the Binance theft has revived debate over federal oversight of crypto exchanges. In Abu Dhabi, the Financial Services Regulatory Authority, which licenses Binance, said on October 30 that it is “engaging closely with Binance and monitoring the incident.”

In the Middle East and North Africa, Gartner forecasts information security spending of $4.07 billion in 2026, up 10.1% from 2025, slightly slower than its forecast for global growth.

FII Institute’s Digital Assets and Tokenized Finance Impact Report 2026 argues that as digital assets move “from experimental to essential, the question of how to build secure, reliable and trustworthy infrastructure becomes paramount.” In the same report, Ryan Hayward, head of digital assets and strategic investments at Barclays, wrote that being thoughtful about digital assets means looking at the risks, “including consumer protection, operational vulnerabilities and financial stability.”

The two latest attacks show who pays when that infrastructure fails. Binance covered its customers’ losses from its own balance sheet. In France, Intermarché said its affected stores had to throw away all fresh and frozen products. As more equipment is connected to the internet, more companies will face similar bills unless they secure it.

Awais Rashid, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Bristol, warned that the supermarket attacks risk “undermining trust in infrastructures on which people rely daily.” As he put it: “The world works because cyber security works effectively.”