Lazarus Gets Banned by Tornado Cash for Hacking $600 Million From Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge

Tornado Cash is a decentralized protocol that allows users to have a private Ethereum transaction on the network. Tornado Cash breaks the on-chain link between the source address and the destination address to keep transactions private.

A smart contract is deployed to execute the private transaction. The protocol is entirely owned by the community, with initial developers holding not a single server. At the time of drafting this article, 2,853,764 ETH blocks have been deposited, and 32,195 unique users have registered on the platform.

Tornado Cash Blocks Lazarus

Tornado Cash has reportedly blocked Lazarus from the network under the ongoing investigations sparked after the FBI made it public that Lazarus could be behind the hack of $600 million on Ronin Bridge.

Lazarus Group allegedly used Tornado Cash to privately withdraw funds without letting anyone know the destination address. The North Korean group has become 1 of 24 addresses to be banned by the United States of America.

Additionally, the US Government believes that Lazarus Group could be behind the hack of 2017. That was the year when the US Government experienced the WannaCry campaign. Since Tornado Cash is obedient in blocking the addresses banned by the Government, it went ahead to block Lazarus from the network.

Surprisingly, Lazarus can still access its smart contract functionality through interactions as Tornado Cash does not prevent blacklisted addresses from interacting with smart contracts.

This action has brought Tornado Cash under the light of criticism. A tweet published by the team recently adds more to this trouble.

Tornado Cash had earlier tweeted that maintaining financial freedom was essential but not at the cost of non-compliance. It received several backlashes for this tweet, and some followers bluntly replied, saying that it was absolutely important to maintain financial freedom at the cost of non-compliance.

Others on the list of getting blacklisted by the country are a Russian ransomware group, Garantex, South Front, and SecondEye.

Garantex has attracted many clients from Russia despite having weak anti-money laundering controls. SecondEye got sanctioned after its founders were charged with the case of selling fake IDs by the US Department of Justice.

South Front is a Russian-based group responsible for publishing bogus military analyses. A Russian ransomware group and several Russian individuals have been sanctioned after they were found guilty of money laundering.

During the chaotic operations of hostile elements, Chainalysis appears to be coming to the rescue for those seeking to remain at a safe spot. Chainalysis conducts its research to add addresses that have been sanctioned, and it then alerts the users every time they are directly or indirectly exposed to sanctioned addresses.