North Korean Hacker Group Lazarus Group Launders Money On Binance
JAKARTA – The cybercriminal group, Lazarus Group, which is well-known as a hacker group sponsored by North Korea, reportedly managed to launder US$5.4 million (approximately Rp.78 billion) of money on the well-known crypto exchange, Binance.
Based on a Reuters search, the money laundering was carried out on the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, in 2020. Hacker group Lazarus stole illicit funds from one of the Slovakia-based crypto trading platforms, Eterbase.
In the process of money laundering, hackers open multiple anonymous accounts to trick the world's largest crypto exchange. Then the group sent the stolen crypto to various accounts that had been created on Binance.
As reported by U.Today, over a five-year period from 2017 to 2021, Binance processed more than US$2.35 billion in criminally obtained cryptocurrency transactions. The exchange, however, has disputed the calculations.
The Lazarus Group first rose to prominence in the early 2010s after launching a cyber-espionage campaign against the South Korean government. It later attracted widespread media coverage after hijacking the Sony Pictures film studio and leaking its classified data, including several copies of the then-unreleased film.
The notorious hacker group was also behind the WannaCry ransomware campaign that infected hundreds of thousands of computers in 2014. After crypto became mainstream in 2017, the Lazarus Group started targeting cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinlink.
U.Today reports that US authorities found the hacker group behind the $625 million Ronin hack that occurred earlier this year. Some of this amount has been washed with the help of a TornadoCash mixer. In late April, Binance recovered some of the funds related to the Ronin heist.
On the other hand, North Korea is reportedly using stolen cryptocurrencies to fund nuclear weapons development and evade international sanctions.