Binance and Huobi Freeze $1.4M Tied to Harmony Bridge Hack

Binance and Huobi Freeze $1.4M Tied to Harmony Bridge Hack

Time Stamp: February 15, 2023 7:21 AM
Source Node: 1959478

Crypto exchanges Binance and Huobi froze accounts containing stolen cryptocurrency from the Harmony Bridge hack last year.

In an announcement on Feb. 14, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said it had collaborated with Binance and Huobi to freeze around $1.4 million worth of crypto held in accounts associated with the Lazarus Group.

The Lazarus Group is a North Korean state-backed cybercrime organization, known to be the perpetrators behind the $100 million exploit on cross-chain protocol Harmony Bridge. 

Elliptic said its investigators traced the entirety of funds moved by the hackers through the coin mixer Tornado Cash and attributed it to Lazarus – something that was later confirmed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The funds remained dormant until recently, when the hackers began to move them through a number of complex transactions to exchanges, seemingly with the intent of cashing out. Elliptic’s investigators notified the platforms of these movements, after which the exchanges quickly froze the accounts. 

“Today, money laundering was detected and stolen funds linked to North Korea were frozen, in real time,” said Elliptic CEO Simone Maini.

Last month, blockchain sleuth ZackXBT uncovered that the hackers had moved 41,000 ETH, worth around $63.5 million at the time, through Railgun’s transaction anonymizing system. He also tagged over 350 wallet addresses associated with the illicit on-chain activity.

Binance and Huobi moved quickly to freeze some of these accounts, recovering 124 Bitcoin from the collaboration.

“Our security teams talk to each other, not all exchanges are collaborative (some have a wrong competitive mindset), but many are,” said Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao in a Jan. 16 tweet.

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