After taking over $600 million from Axie Infinity in the biggest hack of its kind to date, hackers linked to the North Korean government are now cashing in on their loot. In one such case, they tried to cash out through Binance and the exchange was able to snatch close to $6 million from the hackers, founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao revealed. CZ took to Twitter to reveal that his exchange had managed to foil the cash withdrawal process, recovering $5.8 million from the hackers. While this represents a very small portion of the $600 million stolen, it shows that hackers will have a hard time laundering their money. CZ wrote:
The DPRK hacking group started moving their stolen funds from Axie Infinity today. Some of this was done to Binance, spread across more than 86 accounts. $5.8 million has been recovered. We’ve done this many times for other projects in the past as well. Stay #SAFU.
At press time, it was unclear who owned the Binance account and whether the exchange had taken the matter to authorities to go after the owners. As reported by CryptoReport, hackers exploited the Ronin Bridge, an Ethereum sidechain that the game used to transfer tokens. The bridge was prone to attacks as it was highly centralized and required only a few validators to verify transactions. While this made it cheaper and faster, it made it quite prone to attacks.
The US government linked the attack to hackers from the Lazarus Group, a hacking collective with ties to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Once the funds were stolen, the hackers reportedly laundered some almost immediately through Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer that obfuscates the blockchain path of a digital asset and makes it virtually untraceable. As CryptoReport reported, Tornado Cash has become a major concern for law enforcement authorities around the world. Binance has been quite involved in the Axie Infinity story ever since it was mined. He led the funding round that raised $150 million for the game to reimburse players. This was quite significant since he had not participated in any other previous round of Sky Mavis, the Vietnamese company that built Axie. Disclaimer: The information found on CryptoReport is that of the cited writers. It does not represent the opinions of Criptoinforma on whether to buy, sell or hold investments. You are advised to conduct your own research before making any investment decisions. Use the information provided at your own risk. See the Legal Notice for more information.
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