Binance And Huobi Announced Freeze $1.4 Million Crypto-Related To Harmony Hack

Key Points:

• In connection with the Harmony Bridge robbery and the accused North Korean hackers behind it, Binance and Huobi on Tuesday froze $1.4 million in cryptocurrency.
• Elliptic, a crypto tracing company, claimed to have given the two exchanges knowledge that caused them to freeze accounts.
• Elliptic added that it had tracked the frozen Harmony money via Tornado Cash.

According to crypto tracing company Elliptic, crypto exchanges Binance and Huobi on Tuesday froze $1.4 million in cryptocurrency linked to the Harmony Bridge robbery and its claimed North Korean hackers.

Elliptic said in a blog post that it had sent information to the two exchanges that caused them to freeze accounts. It claimed to have been able to track the money back to the $99.6 million bridge breach that gave Harmony blockchain users the ability to transfer cryptocurrency across several ecosystems.

Federal authorities have determined that the Lazarus Group, North Korea’s notorious cyber group, was responsible for the bridge assault as part of their multi-year operation to steal hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency from exchanges and infrastructure. According to investigators, such a campaign supports North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The FBI subsequently confirmed this identification.

The stolen funds stayed dormant until lately, when our detectives started to see how it was being routed to exchanges through intricate webs of transactions. They were able to immediately suspend these accounts and freeze cash by informing these platforms about these unauthorized deposits.

Simone Maini, Elliptic CEO, said:

“Today, money laundering was detected and stolen funds linked to North Korea were frozen, in real time. As an industry we have the power and responsibility to prevent digital assets becoming a haven for money launderers and sanctions evaders, and ensure that they are a force for good.”

Elliptic additionally said that it tracked the funds associated with the now-frozen Harmony project using Tornado Cash, a privacy-focused mixing platform that claims to cover one’s traces on the open Ethereum ledger. Tornado Cash was subject to sanctions by the US because North Korean hackers were allegedly using it.

On June 24, 2022, there was an assault on the Horizon cross-chain bridge. Then, these funds were cleaned using Tornado Cash, which is now authorized.

Horizon asserts that the attacker has only penetrated the bridge to Ethereum while the bridge to Bitcoin is still safe. Despite this, the project suspended Horizon at that time to investigate the vulnerability, as well as notify exchanges to prevent hackers from laundering money.

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Harold

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