North Korea may be behind new $100 million cryptocurrency hack, experts say

North Korean hackers are almost certainly behind an assault final week that stole as a lot as $100 million in cryptocurrency from a U.S. firm, three digital investigative corporations have concluded.

The cryptoassets had been
stolen on June 23 from Horizon Bridge, a service operated by the Concord blockchain that enables property to be transferred to different blockchains.

Since then, exercise by the hackers suggests they might be linked to North Korea, which consultants say is among the many most prolific cyber attackers. U.N. sanctions displays says Pyongyang makes use of the stolen funds to help its nuclear and missile programmes.

The fashion of assault and excessive velocity of structured funds to a mixer – used to obscure the origin of funds – is just like earlier assaults that had been attributed to North Korea-linked actors, Chainalysis, a blockchain agency working with Concord to analyze the assault, stated on Twitter on Tuesday.

That conclusion was echoed by different investigators.

“Preliminarily this appears to be like like a North Korean hack primarily based on transaction behaviour,” stated Nick Carlsen, a former FBI analyst who now investigates North Korea’s cryptocurrency heists for TRM Labs, a U.S.-based agency.

There are robust indications that North Korea’s Lazarus Group could also be liable for this theft, primarily based on the character of the hack and the following laundering of the stolen funds, one other agency, Elliptic, stated in a report on Thursday.

“The thief is making an attempt to interrupt the transaction path again to the unique theft,” the report stated. “This makes it simpler to money out the funds at an change.”

If confirmed, the assault can be the eighth exploit this 12 months – totalling $1 billion in stolen funds – that could possibly be attributed to North Korea with confidence, accounting for 60% of complete funds stolen in 2022, Chainalysis stated.

North Korea’s capability to money in on its stolen property might have been difficult by the current drop in cryptocurrency values, consultants and South Korean officers informed Reuters, presumably threatening a key supply of funding for the sanctions-strapped nation.

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