Hackers in North Korea are under suspicion in the $100 million Horizon Bridge cryptocurrency heist that happened last week.
Elliptic fingers, a blockchain forensics company, in a news report released this week, noted that a hacking unit, Lazarus Group that has connections with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is probably the mind behind the huge theft. This adds to the many victories that the group had. Lazarus is also being blamed for the massive robbery of $625 million by the FBI.
Elliptic noted that there are strong signs that say that North Korea’s Lazarus Group has conducted this theft on the basis of the nature of the hack and the laundering of the stolen funds. Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency monitoring group, also agrees with Elliptic’s findings.
Harmony, a California-based firm, was reported to be involved in the most recent hack that happened late last week. Harmony encompasses a “Horizon Bridge” that would enable users to transfer crypto among various blockchains. While initially breaching, Hackers made the usernames and passwords of customers their targets. Since then, Harmony has started a “global manhunt” for the group involved.
1/ Harmony has begun a global manhunt for the criminal(s) who stole $100M from the Horizon bridge. All exchanges have been notified. Law enforcement, @Chainalysis, and @AnChainAI have active investigations to identify the responsible actors and recover the stolen assets.
— Harmony
According to Elliptic, the hackers were quick to wash away those assets last week. The Horizon Bridge hacker transferred around 41% of the stolen digital assets using the Tornado Cash mixer. The mixer is a kind of “demixing” tool that is often used for hiding the trail of funds.
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Chainalysis supported this analysis on Thursday. The crypto monitoring fund is assisting Harmony in the investigation of the theft. In a tweet, Chain analysis stated that the attack vector & high velocity of structured payments to a mixer mirrors the previous attacks that were credited to DPRK-linked actors.
1/
From 7:28 GMT to *right now*, the hacker has sent 13.5k ETH to https://t.co/NDtymkfQZJ. The attack vector & high velocity of structured payments to a mixer is similar to previous attacks that were attributed to DPRK-linked actorshttps://t.co/xYx6ITl2yk— Chainalysis (@chainalysis) June 27, 2022
Harmony mentioned in a statement on Wednesday that it has informed law enforcement regarding the investigation of the theft and started its own investigation of the case. The firm has also given a final ultimatum to the hackers: “Return the stolen funds now and keep $10 million for yourselves.”
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/07/01/is-north-korea-behind-the-100-million-horizon-bridge-cryptocurrency-theft/