The United States has accused North Korean hacker group Lazarus of stealing $625 million in cryptocurrency from the Ronin Network, which is owned by developer group Sky Mavis.
The FBI has also linked the Lazarus Group to the Ronin security breach after the US Treasury Department updated sanctions to include the wallet address that received the funds and was linked to the Lazarus Group.
“To mitigate future risk, we are still adding additional security measures before redeploying the Ronin Bridge. The bridge is expected to be operational by the end of the month “Ronin Network said late Thursday in a statement.
Ronin is the Blockchain platform that powers the popular non-fungible token (NFT) game Axie Infinity.
The bridge, which allows users to transfer funds between other blockchains and Axie Infinity, has been shut down since the cyber-attack.
“We expect to deliver a full post-mortem that will detail security measures put in place and next steps by the end of the month,” the crypto network added.
In March, hackers stole cryptocurrencies worth $625 million from Ronin one of the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) breaches to date.
Sky Mavis, the operator of the Blockchain platform and Axie Infinity, admitted the security breach, stating that 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5 million USDC (a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar) was drained from the Ronin Bridge in two transactions.
“In order to forge fake withdrawals, the attacker used hacked private keys. We discovered the attack after receiving a report that a user was unable to withdraw $5,000 in ETH from the bridge “According to a statement issued by Ronin Network.
The Ronin Bridge was temporarily halted by the company to ensure that no further attack vectors remained open.
Hackers stole $120 million in crypto tokens from the Blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) platform BadgerDAO in January of this year. Before the platform could stop the cyber-attack, several crypto wallets were drained.
In December of last year, cybercriminals stole $80 million in cryptocurrency from Qubit Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform.
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