North Korean Hackers Move $63M Stolen From Horizon Bridge
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North Korean Hackers Move $63M Stolen From Horizon Bridge

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1 year ago

The Lazarus Group is trying to move a large chunk of the $100 million stolen from the Harmony blockchain's cross-chain payments bridge in June.

North Korean Hackers Move $63M Stolen From Horizon Bridge

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North Korea's state-sponsored Lazarus Group hackers are on the move, funneling about two thirds of the $100 million stolen in the Horizon Bridge hack in June.

According to on-chain sleuth ZachXBT, about 41,000 ETH worth $63.5 million were moved through Railgun over the weekend.

Railgun is a mixer alternative that uses zk-SNARKS cryptography to make "transactions fully invisible" by shielding them so that "every transaction appears on the blockchain as being sent from the Railgun contract address," according to the Railgun Project.

The hackers then began "consolidating funds and depositing on three different exchanges," ZachXBT said, listing more than 350 addresses associated with the crime.

Working Together

Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao said on Monday that his security team had also spotted the movement and helped seize and $2.6 million in stolen crypto.

"They previously tried to launder through Binance and we froze his accounts," Zhao tweeted on Jan. 16. "This time he used Huobi. We assisted [the] Huobi team to freeze his accounts. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered. CeFi helping to keep DeFi #SAFU!"

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The Harmony Blockchain's Horizon Bridge was cracked in June after the Lazarus Group were able to steal the passwords of two of the five validators — all that was needed to validate transactions. The lack of sufficient validators was a problem pointed out two months earlier but apparently ignored.
About 65,000 wallet addresses were robbed, but the Harmony developers used the project's treasury to make victims whole.
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