The decentralized finance project was hit for $197 million by a flash loan attack that worked through the North Korean-favored Tornado Cash mixer sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury last year.
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A $200 million DeFi theft may have been the work of infamous North Korean hackers.
According to blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis, a small amount of Ether stolen from Euler Finance was sent to an address that had received funds stolen by the Lazarus Group in the $625 million hack of the Axie Infinity game's Ronin Bridge.
A large chunk of those funds were run through the Tornado Cash mixing service, leading to its sanctioning by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) in August.
And, some of the funds used to launch the Euler attack came from a Tornado Cash account. Then some of the stolen crypto was moved back through it.
Still, Chainalysis warned that "it's possible that this movement of funds was an attempt at misdirection by another hacking group."
For one thing, the transfer from the Euler Finance hackers wallet was just 100 ETH, worth about $170,000.
That said, the Euler Finance hack was in the style of the Lazarus Group — one huge hit based on an exploit — which U.S. intelligence believes is being used to fund the rogue nation's nuclear weapons program.
While Euler wasn't the first DeFi hack of the year — the stablecoin project dForce was hit for $3.6 million on Feb. 13 and the Avalanche-based Platypus Finance stablecoin protocol was robbed of $9.1 million on Feb. 16 — but it was by far the largest at $197 million worth of Wrapped Bitcoin, staked Ether, and the USDC and DAI stablecoins.
North Korean hackers stole $1.7 billion of the $3.1 billion stolen from DeFi projects in 2022, according to Chainalysis' 2023 Crypto Crime Report.
