Bank regulators phone lenders after Binance hack as new guidelines take effect

On Nov. 2, Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency supervisors began phoning U.S. banks about outages or unusual system activity after a $6.3 billion hack at crypto exchange Binance. The same day, a joint OCC and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation rule took effect raising the bar for a matter requiring attention, a formal notice to fix a problem: examiners must now tie a weakness to likely serious financial harm or a real legal violation, with lesser issues becoming supervisory observations. The Federal Reserve did not join the rule and pursues a similar internal standard. Binance said it replaced about 95% of stolen funds; the FBI blamed North Korea’s TraderTraitor group for the Oct. 29 theft.