Binance and Huobi continue to freeze an additional $1.4 million in crypto from the Harmony hack after hackers tried to erase the funds through Tornado Cash.
As Kyptos reported, Harmony’s Horizon bridge was attacked by a group of North Korean hackers in June 2022 and withdrew many ERC-20 tokens. The hacker then converted the obtained money into more than 85,000 ETH, worth nearly $100 million at the time. This is considered one of the The most damaging security attacks in 2022.
On January 16, 2023, a long period of silence with the stolen money, the hacker was discovered and began to move. 41,000 ETH to the Railgun coin mixer, then loaded onto exchanges. Including Binance and Huobi, but these two exchanges have been banned freeze accounts with a total value of 124 BTC.
In the latest development, cryptocurrency tracker Elliptic tracked the stolen funds through a Tornado Cash mixer. They discovered an additional $1.4 million in dirty money and quickly notified the two exchanges Binance and Huobi, and then “stopped” this money falling into the hands of hackers.
Exchanges @binance and @HuobiGlobal today frozen accounts containing $1.4 million stolen by North Korea’s Lazarus Group. This was made possible thanks to intel from Elliptic’s real-time investigations tools and a swift response by the receiving exchanges.https://t.co/f5bVpm8yfH
— elliptic (@elliptic) February 14, 2023
Elliptic further stated that it is still tracking funds from the now-frozen Harmony case through Tornado Cash, which has been suppressed by the US because of its popularity for illicit use.
The US FBI has confirmed that the notorious North Korean hacker group behind the Harmony attack is called Lazarus Group. The Horizon Bridge attack is part of a years-long campaign to steal hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto from exchanges and infrastructure. Investigators say the campaign funded North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
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