On January 15, 2023, on-chain researchers discovered that funds stolen in the Harmony Bridge attack had been moved. The thieves, allegedly associated with the North Korean hacking syndicate Lazarus Group, moved 41,000 Ethereum worth $63.2 million at current exchange rates.
Onchain researchers tracked the stolen Ethereum from the Harmony Bridge attack and helped major exchanges freeze the funds
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Last June 23, the Harmony development team announced that $100 million in cryptocurrency funds had been stolen from the Horizon bridge. Reportedly, the attackers used a multi-signature wallet to gain control of the bridge; Onchain researcher Zachxbtdiscovered that the funds associated with the loss of the Horizon bridge began moving after 206 daysand 41,000ETHand found ETH(equivalent to $63.2 million at the current exchange rate) was found to have been transferred.
“North Korea’s Lazarus Group had a very busy weekend, consolidating funds and depositing them on three exchanges after moving $63.5 million (about $41,000 ETH) through Railgun from the Harmony bridge hack.” Zachxbt tweeted. Funds were reportedly deposited into OKEx, Huobi, and Binance; Zachxbt added that Huobi and Binance have frozen some of the Ethereum sent to the exchanges.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (aka “CZ”) confirmed that the funds were indeed frozen.” We have detected the movement of funds by Harmony One hackers,” CZ wrote.” They previously tried to launder money through Binance and we froze their accounts. This time they used Huobi. We assisted the Huobi team to freeze their account. Together we recovered 124BTC, BTCwas recovered,” added the Binance executive.
Blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic initially linked thefunds to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, which has been accused of numerous attacks against cryptocurrency projects in recent years. The North Korean hacker group is also believed to have been behind the Ronin bridge attack on the $620 million
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