18,036 ETH Stolen Transferred To Tornado Cash, Want To Launder Money?

The theft of tens of thousands of Ethereum from the Harmony Protocol. (Unsplash)

JAKARTA – As previously reported, Harmony Protocol has offered $1 million to anyone who is able to find the perpetrators of the theft in its network amounting to US$80 million some time ago. But hackers returned some of it and stole the remaining 21 million US dollars in Ethereum.

According to PechShieldAlert, hackers are considered to be laundering money on the Tornado Cash platform. This is because as of June 28, approximately 18,0363,3 ETH worth around US$21 million has been transferred from Horizon Bridge to the exploit's main wallet. Over the course of 10 hours, this money is divided equally in three ways and sent to three different addresses in one transaction.

That's understandable because Tornado Cash can only deposit a maximum of 100 ETH at a time. Therefore it takes longer to send large amounts of ETH. Perpetrators try to obscure the path of coin transactions so that they cannot be traced.

The first and second wallets that got ETH from the exploiter's main wallet have finished exchanging coins and now have around 16.3 ETH in total, which is likely not enough to warrant further investigation. The third wallet transferred batches of 100 ETH to Tornado at eight-minute intervals and had 2,800 coins left at the time of writing.

FBI intervenes

On June 27, the project's Twitter account confirmed that the team was investigating the incident with “two highly reputable blockchain tracking and analysis partners,” as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Around 80 million US dollars in ETH remains in the explorer's main wallet. They can return some of the stolen money to Horizon, or they can rest because the exploit took almost 13 hours to deliver just 21 million US dollars.

On June 25, Harmony founder Stephen Tse acknowledged that the exploiter obtained possession of two Horizon Bridge signers for the multi-sig address used to secure the funds.

He mentioned that the Ethereum side of the bridge affected by the vulnerability has been moved to a more secure multi-sig wallet that requires four signers. As such, it appears that tracking down stolen money from Harmony's Horizon Bridge is likely to face difficulties, as reported by Coincu.