North Korea’s Lazarus Group moved crypto assets worth $63.5m into three different exchanges between January 13 and January 14, 2023. According to the source, a total of 41000 ETH was transferred from the recently exploited Harmony bridge hack, using Railgun before depositing the funds in three exchanges including Binance, and Huobi.
Lazarus Group is a well-known cybercrime group that comprises anonymous individuals and is managed by the government of North Korea. They have been involved in several online attacks since 2010. Railgun is a blockchain privacy platform that uses zero-knowledge proofs to hide transactions.
According to ZachXBT, the illegal activity involved over 350 addresses, and the exchanges are not verified yet as the group made swiftly. It can also be recalled that Harmony Bridge was exploited on June 24, 2022, where over $100 million was stolen.
While the transfers were made, Binance was able to freeze the account being used to launder the money and also help Huobi avoid further theft. According to CZ, they were able to recover 124 BTC from the Lazarus Group.
Over $ 2 billion stolen by Lazarus Group
Since its escapade in the crypto industry, the Lazarus Group is said to have stolen more than $2 billion to date. One of its largest operations is linked with the $600 million theft on the Ronin Bridge that occurred in 2022.
By the close of the year 2022, Kaspersky, a Web3 security firm, said that the group disguised itself as a VC firm targeted at several startups. “Lazarus Group has expanded its criminal activities to include posing as venture capitalists looking to invest in crypto startups,” Decrypto said.
According to Kaspersky, Lazarus Group adopted the name BlueNoroff as a VC firm and created several fake websites to impersonate venture capital companies and banks. While the activities of BlueNoroff started in Q1 of 2022, they became less active until later in the year, and were able to steal crypto assets.
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