Elliptic’s blockchain intelligence tracking firm, Elliptic, tracked the first $140 million of transactions that North Korean hackers made to conceal their money trail.
In a statement, the company said that the stolen funds were being moved through anonymous exchanges and then converted into Bitcoin. This process makes it difficult to track down the assets. blog post This Saturday
“The second step of the laundering process is to ‘layer’ the stolen funds in order to attempt to conceal the transaction trail,” Elliptic written “This transaction trail can be followed, but these layering tactics can complicate the tracing process, buying the launderers valuable time to cash out the assets.”
This is the biggest crypto-related theft since 2021, when Poly Network was robbed of $611 million.
Elliptic Intelligence, and Arkham Intelligence, have linked this attack with the Lazarus Group of North Korea. They cited the use decentralized exchanges as well as other services such a cross-chain and coin swap service to try and confuse investigators.
“If previous laundering patterns are followed, we might expect to see the use of mixers next to further obfuscate the transaction trail,” It was said. It is possible that this may prove difficult because of the “sheer volume of stolen assets.”
Within hours TheftThe attackers divided the assets into 50 wallets each holding around 10,000 ETH. According to Elliptic, the funds are being converted into Bitcoin and emptied in a systematic manner.
To avoid asset freezing, the attackers converted stolen tokens such as stETH or cmETH into Ethereum on decentralized exchanges.
This matches Lazarus Group's typical laundering playbook of converting stolen tokens to "native" Elliptic wrote that it is important to understand the blockchain before further confusion.
To date, the group has stolen over $3 billion in crypto assets since 2017, Reportedly funding North Korea's ballistic missile program with the proceeds, according to a UN report Elliptic reported that the figure for last year is believed to be higher.
As a result of the theft on Sunday, Bybit is now facing pressure from users' withdrawals, who have since pulled roughly 23,000 BTC from Bybit's hot wallet, Arkham Intelligence show.
Bitcoin’s balance on the main exchange wallets has fallen from 72,000 BTC to 52,000 BTC. That is a drop of $1.7 Billion since Friday.
Bybit, according to a further analysis, has witnessed outflows in the amount of $6 billion from various crypto.
Anonymous Crypto Exchange Accused
ZachXBT has also pointed Elliptic, as well as others, to the anonymous crypto-exchange eXch, which they claim processed "tens of millions of dollars" Bybit was unable to prevent the theft of assets despite being asked directly by Bybit.
“The stolen Ethereum is steadily being converted to Bitcoin, using eXch and other services,” Elliptic wrote yesterday.
Email response purportedly from eXch Archived on X Elliptic cited a report on Saturday alleging that Bybit has refused to accept requests made by the crypto exchange. "direct attacks on the reputation" The former was the case in the past.
"It is difficult for us to understand the expectation of collaboration" You can get a lot of help from a company that is reputable. "actively undermined our reputation," The email reads:
It took a while for the exchange to respond. Decrypt’s Commentary is requested.
The aforementioned is a You can post a comment below. eXch denied that allegations made against it were false in a Bitcoin Forum on Sunday.
“We are not laundering money for Lazarus/DPRK,” eXch claimed that this allegation is the “perspective of some people that wish decentralized coins' fungibility and on-chain privacy to vanish.”
Addendum: “The insignificant part of funds that was processed by us from the Bybit hack in an isolated case will be donated to various open-source initiatives dedicated to privacy and security both inside and outside crypto space.”
Sebastian Sinclair edited the book
