The US government has filed its latest lawsuit to claw back more than $2.67 million in stolen digital assets from the notorious Lazarus hacking group of North Korea.
The US government has filed its latest lawsuit to claw back more than $2.67 million in stolen digital assets from the notorious Lazarus hacking group of North Korea.
The complaint was filed on October 4, 2024, and targets funds from two of the largest cryptocurrency heists in 2022 and 2023—the Deribit hack and the Stake.com breach.
According to the court documents, law enforcement is chasing about $1.7 million in Tether (USDT) that was stolen from the options exchange Deribit in an incident which had led to a loss of $28 million.
The hackers attempted to conceal their actions and launder the stolen money using the Tornado Cash mixer and multiple Ethereum addresses. In addition, the government seeks to recover about $970,000 in Avalanche-bridged-Bitcoin (BTC.b) as a consequence of the hack of the Stake.com gambling platform that led to losses of over $41 million in damages.
These cases are just a few examples of the alleged Lazarus Group’s cybercriminal activity. Blockchain analysts also blame the group for the hack of the WazirX exchange in July 2024, which eventually cost victims an estimated $235 million.
An August report from on-chain investigator ZackXBT exposed that North Korean developers have allegedly been compromising at least 25 different cryptocurrency projects by posing under fake identities, tampering with code, and stealing directly from project treasuries.
The FBI has recently been ramping up its warnings over the activities of the Lazarus Group. In September 2024, it highlighted some of the highly sophisticated social engineering methods employed by the cybercrime group, including cunningly crafted fake job offers that are designed to dupe users into downloading malware masquerading as employment documents.
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