Crypto trade Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou says greater than two-thirds of the digital property stolen from the platform in February by North Korea’s Lazarus Group nonetheless remain traceable.
In an govt abstract on hacked Bybit funds posted on X on April 21, Ben Zhou said that of the entire $1.4 billion hacked, 68.6% “stays traceable,” 27.6% has “gone darkish,” and three.8% has been frozen.
The untraceable funds primarily flowed into mixers, then by bridges to peer-to-peer and over-the-counter platforms, he added.
In February, hackers related to the Lazarus Group exploited vulnerabilities in Bybit’s chilly pockets infrastructure, stealing $1.4 billion within the largest crypto exchange hack thus far.
“Just lately, now we have noticed that the mixer primarily utilized by the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] is Wasabi,” Zhou mentioned earlier than stating that following the Wasabi washing of BTC, “a small portion of it entered CryptoMixer, Twister Money, and Railgun.”
Zhou confirmed that 944 Bitcoin (BTC) value round $90 million went by the Wasabi mixer. A number of crosschain and swap companies have been carried out by platforms corresponding to THORChain, eXch, Lombard, LI.FI, Stargate and SunSwap earlier than the loot finally entered P2P and OTC companies, he added.
One other 432,748 Ether (ETH), round 84% of the entire value roughly $1.21 billion, has been transferred from Ethereum to Bitcoin by way of THORChain. Round two-thirds of that — round $960 million value of Ether — has been transformed into 10,003 BTC throughout 35,772 wallets, he added.
Round $17 million value of Ether stays on the Ethereum blockchain throughout 12,490 wallets, Zhou reported.
Bybit pays round $2.3 million in bounties
Zhou additionally revealed that solely 70 of 5,443 bounty stories obtained over the previous 60 days have been legitimate.
Bybit launched the Lazarus Bounty program in February, providing a complete of $140 million in rewards for info resulting in funds being frozen.
To this point, it has paid out $2.3 million to 12 bounty hunters. Most of this went to at least one entity, the Mantle layer-2 platform, whose efforts resulted in $42 million value of frozen funds.
Associated: Lazarus Group’s 2024 pause was repositioning for $1.4B Bybit hack
“We welcome extra stories, we’d like extra bounty hunters that may decode mixers, as we’d like lots of assist there down the street,” Zhou mentioned.
On April 17, the eXch crypto trade announced it might stop operations on Could 1 after stories alleged the agency was used to launder funds from the Bybit hack.
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Cointelegraph by Martin Younger Two-thirds of Lazarus-hacked funds remain traceable cointelegraph.com 2025-04-21 05:54:14
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