FBI accuses North Korean hackers of breaching Harmony’s $ 100 million network

On Monday, January 23, the FBI announced that North Korean hackers Lazarus Group and APT38 were responsible for the Harmony Protocol breach. The $ 100 million exploit took place in June last year. Back then, hackers withdrew the stolen cryptocurrency and sent the assets to a decentralized exchange for conversion into Ethereum. Immediately after the exploit, representatives of the Harmony protocol offered the Lazarus Group a reward for returning the stolen funds. However, the attackers were not interested in $ 1 million.

Law enforcement officers found out that on January 13, hackers used the Railgun privacy protocol to launder more than $ 60 million in ETH stolen from the Horizon bridge. Subsequently, some of these funds were frozen by the BTC on platforms cooperating with the Bureau.

The remaining bitcoins were transferred to 11 addresses — the FBI published the list in its press release.

Some of the assets in ETH were subsequently sent by hackers to several crypto exchanges and also converted into BTC. The FBI claims that the stolen cryptocurrency is used by the North Korean authorities to finance ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction programs.

Recently, the head of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance Чанпен Чжао" href="https://noworries.media/biography/chanpen-chzhao/" data-bio-id="3681">Changpeng Zhao said that the platform’s security specialists managed to find and return the bitcoins stolen from the Harmony bridge. CZ reported that the exchange managed to return 124 BTC (about $ 2.8 million at the current exchange rate). Earlier, the hackers tried to launder funds through Binance, but the platform’s specialists immediately froze their accounts. During the new money laundering attempt, the attackers used the Huobi exchange, but Binance experts helped to detect illegal activity in time and block the hackers' accounts.