Lazarus Group may be responsible for Harmony Bridge hack
On June 23, 2022, Harmony Bridge fell victim to an attack that saw them lose about $100 million.
Recent reports show that the notorious North Korean hacker organization Lazarus Group may be responsible for the attack. Additionally, the group has been accused of moving funds to multiple exchanges.
Lazarus Group linked to the Harmony Bridge hack
The hacker group has previously been linked to other network breaches over the years, amounting to over $2 billion. Moreover, the group’s name appeared in connection with the Harmony attack in June 2022.
About a week ago, the Lazarus group transferred 41,000 ETH ($63.5 million). Previously, the hackers made transactions on Tornado Cash before it was banned. This time, the transfers were made through Railgun for its privacy and anonymity provisions.
According to recent updates, the hackers reportedly created various transactions and transferred funds to exchanges like Binance, Huobi, and OKX. The funds were quickly converted to BTC and withdrawn from the exchanges upon transfer.
A tweet by ZachXBT showed transfers on Jan. 13 that involved 350,000 separate wallet addresses. In another tweet on Jan. 18th, he said that the hackers had withdrawn at least $26.4m from Huobi.
The funds were then deposited in bitcoin mixers, chain-hopped stolen funds, and sent to exchanges. The detective also gave an example of the hacker chain-hopping funds from Bitcoin, Avalanche, Ethereum, BitTorrent, and Tron.
Binance CEO responds to the hack claims
Changpeng Zhao came to Twitter to address the claims. He acknowledged that the hacker group had previously tried to launder money through Binance. He also said Binance and Huobi had come together after detecting funds movement. Fortunately, they managed to freeze the transfers and recover funds before it was too late.
Additionally, CZ reported a total recovery of 124 BTC, indicating that the hackers had converted funds from ETH to BTC. The Lazarus Group may have successfully transferred as ETH, but the tokens were likely swapped to BTC during the consolidation process.
