a whopping 41,000 ETH The Lazarus group stolen by North Korean hackers is currently being deposited on crypto exchanges.
According to an analysis of token movements shared online, ETH was sent through the anonymity system Railgun before being consolidated into wallets and sent to three major crypto exchanges, presumably to be exchanged for fiat currency.
41,000 ETH now floating around which is worth $64.2m at today’s exchange rate, and originated from the infamous harmony bridge hack In June of 2022. The bridge was used to transfer tokens between the Harmony Network and Ethereum, BNB Chain and Bitcoin,
“A very busy weekend” for Lazarus Group
Details about this week’s token movements were shared on Twitter by on-chain analyst ZachXBT, who said that Lazarus Group is having a “very busy weekend” funding:
In a follow-up tweet, ZachXBT also linked to the website Chainbuyz.com, where he shared a full list of nearly 400 Ethereum addresses that he claims were involved in the operation.
124 BTC recovered, claims CZ
During this, binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, also took to Twitter on Monday to comment on the situation.
According to CZ, the hackers this time did not use Binance as one of their own, but a competing exchange. Huobi, Huobi received help from Binance to freeze the hacker’s accounts, he said.
CZ also said that a combined 124 BTC ($2.6m) has now been recovered from the hackers, which indicates that at least some of the hacker’s ETH has been converted to BTC.
“We traced the Harmony One hacker fund movement. They previously tried to launder money through Binance and we froze their accounts. This time they used Huobi. We assisted the Huobi team in freezing their accounts. Assisted. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered,” CZ wrote,
Huobi has not commented on the situation other than to retweet An article stating that the exchange had frozen accounts with funds linked to the hack.
More than a billion dollars stolen since 2017
In December last year, a report by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service revealed that North Korean hackers were responsible for Over $1 Billion in Digital Assets Stolen Since 2017.
More than half of that, or about $626m, was stolen in 2022, the report said, with the North Korean government believed to be using the proceeds from the illegal activity to develop its nuclear weapons programme. Does
The Lazarus Group and other cybercrime syndicates in the country are widely believed to be backed by the government.
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