Harmony Hacker Sends Stolen Money To Tornado Cash

Harmony’s Horizon Bridge stolen money has begun to flow into the Tornado Cash Ethererum mixer, indicating that the attacker has no intention of taking the $1 million rewards offered.

As previously reported by CoinCu, the fact that Harmony Protocol is offering $1 million in rewards seems to be too little compared to the amount of money stolen by hackers. And according to the latest announcement by PeckShieldAlert, this money was once again laundered via Tornado Cash.

At 03:10 a.m. ET on June 28, a total of 18,036.3 ETH worth approximately $21 million was transferred out of the Horizon Bridge exploiter’s principal wallet. Over the next 10 hours, these monies were divided evenly three ways and transmitted to three distinct addresses in single transactions.

Tornado Cash can only mix a maximum of 100 ETH at a once, therefore huge amounts can easily take several hours to mix. ETH mixing is a privacy mechanism that obfuscates the transaction path of coins so that they cannot be tracked back to prior transactions.

The first and second wallets that got ETH from the exploiter’s primary wallet have finished mixing the coins and are now left with roughly 16.3 ETH total, which is likely insufficient to warrant further investigation. The third wallet was transferring batches of 100 ETH to Tornado at eight-minute intervals and had 2,800 coins left at the time of writing.

The Harmony team has yet to respond to the question of what it intends to do to replace the stolen monies in the bridge.

On June 27, the project’s Twitter account confirmed that the team was investigating the incident with “two highly reputable blockchain tracing and analysis partners,” as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Approximately $80 million in ETH remains in the explorer’s primary wallet. They could be returning some of the stolen monies to Horizon, or they could be taking a break because it took the exploiter nearly 13 hours to mix just $21 million.

Although the haul was first valued at around $100 million, positive ETH price changes have lifted the USD value to $101.5 million.

On June 25, Harmony’s founder, Stephen Tse, acknowledged that the exploiter gained possession of the needed two Horizon Bridge signees for the multi-sig address used to secure funds. He mentioned that the Ethereum side of the bridge that was impacted by the vulnerability has been relocated to a more secure multi-sig wallet that required four signees.

Thus, it seems that tracing the stolen money from Harmony’s Horizon Bridge seems to be facing difficulties.

DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

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Harold

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