Binance claimed it was able to retrieve around $5.8 million worth of stolen treasure that had found its way into its platform in disguised form, more than a week after the US linked one of the biggest crypto heists to a North Korean hacker gang.
The specifics of how it did so should serve as a warning to those attempting to cash out ill-gotten bitcoin gains: it’s only going to grow more difficult.
The loss of more than $600 million in bitcoin from the Ronin software bridge, which is used by players of Axie Infinity to move cryptocurrency, was linked to the North Korean hacker organisation Lazarus by the US Treasury Department last week.
The agency discovered an Ethereum wallet address linked to the organisation and added it to its list of sanctioned entities.
Working with other organisations, Binance was able to track stolen cash from the hackers’ wallet to Tornado Cash — a service that allows for anonymous token transfers on the Ethereum blockchain — and then to its exchange.
“When exposure to our platform was discovered, we worked with industry-leading blockchain analytics firms and quickly froze the money,” the representative stated. According to Binance’s chief executive officer, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the cryptocurrency was identified in 86 separate accounts on the platform.
While the sum recovered is only a fraction of the $600 million in cryptocurrency stolen, the achievement boosts expectations of retrieving more of the assets as hackers continue to transfer them around.
According to blockchain statistics, over 56 200 Ether, or nearly $170 million in stolen coins, was transferred out of the criminals’ principal address on the Ethereum blockchain in the last week.
All of the stolen monies were moved to new addresses, with some of those addresses moving the tokens to Tornado Cash. According to blockchain monitoring provider Peckshield, more than $230 million in cryptocurrency has been transferred from the wallet.
To read our blog on “IoTex (IOTX) Upgrade & Hard Fork will be supported by Binance,” click here.
