North Korea Hackers Simulation Lazarus Group Again Launder Tens Of Million Dollars In ETH

Hacker Lazarus performs money laundering from stolen assets. (Photo; Doc. Cybernews)

JAKARTA - North Korea's leading hacker group, Lazarus Group, is reportedly again laundering money from the ETH crypto theft from Harmony Bridge. Lazarus recently locked $ 21.18 million (equivalent to $ IDR 317 billion) in crypto Ethereum.

This was announced by on-chain data researcher ZachXBT. Laundering was carried out by hacker groups last weekend. Furthermore, ZachXBT outlines that they have shipped stolen cryptocurrencies to six crypto exchangers.

However, a number of assets that have been sent to the crypto exchange, one of which is Binance, has frozen the crypto trading company owned by Changpeng Zhao. So they could not disburse funds of hundreds of billions of rupiah.

However, the money laundering action has been detected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI also succeeded in identifying the Lazarus sub-unit, APT38, as the mastermind behind the hacking of Harmony Bridge. CryptoSlate reports that the Lazarus Group has various units and related organizations supported by the North Korean government.

As of January 13, hackers had laundered more than 60 million dollars in stolen ETH, which helped the FBI identify the attackers. In addition, several stolen funds have been frozen by the FBI with the help of a number of crypto exchanges.

According to a recent report, Lazarus Group managed to steal 41.000 Ethereum (ETH) from a Harmony Bridge hack that was carried out in June 2022. Then in early January 2023, the hacker group began shipping their stolen assets to various crypto exchanges for money laundering.

Knowing the illegal act, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao immediately became the same as a number of other crypto exchanges including Huobi to prevent the financial crime. Lazarus is known to have used a multi-sig wallet to take over Harmony's Horizon Bridge network.

"We detected the movement of Harmony One's hacker funds," said Changpeng Zhao.

Prior to the money laundering attempt in ETH, Lazarus was also known to have committed money laundering in Bitcoin. Zhao said there were 124 BTCs that the Lazarus group wanted to disburse, but Binance managed to freeze their accounts.

"They previously tried washing through Binance and we frozen their accounts. This time they used Huobi. We helped Huobi's team in freezing their accounts. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered," added CZ.