North Korea linked to latest crypto hacks, surpassing $270m

Recent investigations link North Korea’s Lazarus Group to a series of crypto hacks totaling over $270 million in stolen assets across major platforms in the past 102 days.

Investigations suggest the latest high-profile hacks targeting crypto entities have been perpetrated by North Korean hackers, particularly the notorious Lazarus Group, with over $270 million stolen over the past 102 days.

Data from a consolidated list of the last four massive crypto-related hacks sheds light on this. The list was compiled by MetaMask’s lead product manager Taylor Mohana (Tayvano), and featured contributions from prominent on-chain sleuth ZachXBT.

Notably, the latest among these hacks involved an exploit of crypto exchange CoinEx’s hot wallets. The funds reported stolen amounted to $27.8 million at the time of the initial report. However, the stolen assets rose to $54 million as industry leaders uncovered the incident.

Following the hack, ZachXBT suggested that the hack was carried out by Lazarus Group. The team at SlowMist, a prominent blockchain security company, confirmed this theory. 

A week before the CoinEx exploit, leading crypto casino platform Stake suffered a hack that saw the attackers drain up to $41 million in several crypto assets, including BNB and Polygon (MATIC). They moved the assets from Stake’s hot wallets.

ZachXBT revealed that the wallets linked to the Stake hack were also leveraged to steal funds during the CoinEX incident. The FBI had confirmed in a Sept. 6 release that the Lazarus Group was responsible for the Stake hack.

Furthermore, in July, reports suggested that Estonian-based crypto payments resource CoinsPaid had witnessed an attack, resulting in $37 million in stolen funds. The exploit took six months to execute and was also attributed to the Lazarus Group.

Payment platform Alphapo was also a victim of a large-scale hack in July. The exploit led to the loss of $23 million in various crypto assets, including Bitcoin (BTC), Tron (TRX) and Ethereum (ETH). This hack has been traced to the Lazarus Group.

However, the largest hack attributed to the group occurred in June and involved over $115 million in crypto theft from Atomic Wallet. Some funds were funneled through wallets linked to the notorious hacking group.