Binance ‘red teams’ its own staff every month to keep hackers out

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance runs simulated phishing attacks against its own employees and can fire staff who repeatedly fail the tests, according to Binance chief security officer Jimmy Su.The fake attacks are conducted by Binance’s red team, an internal ethical hacking unit whose job is to break into systems to identify vulnerabilities.“We do phishing attacks on our own employees on a monthly basis just so we understand if our security hygiene is improving,” Su told Cointelegraph. “The ones that have failed it, we will do remediation training.” The measure shows the lengths crypto companies will go to prepare for social engineering attacks. Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world, reports 323 million registered users, while DefiLlama estimates the exchange holds $137.7 billion in assets.Jimmy Su, chief security officer at Binance. Source: BinanceIn February, AMLBot estimated that 65% of crypto security incidents in 2025 were driven by social engineering. In April, Drift Protocol suffered a $285 million hack, which came after a long-term social engineering campaign. Su said Binance has been running these simulated attacks for three to four years. “In the beginning, th...