According to a statement made public by the FBI on Thursday, the Lazarus Group, a North Korean hacking group, was in charge of stealing $41 million in digital assets from the cryptocurrency casino Stake this week.
Shortly after the incident occurred on Monday, the Drake-backed gaming company informed players that a Stake-led investigation was in progress. Initially, the company called a group of related transactions “unauthorized transfers.”
The FBI shared the findings of their own probe and provided addresses for numerous digital wallets that are allegedly holding stolen money. According to the FBI, Lazarus Group distributed cryptocurrency over the networks of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain.
The agency asserted that the attack by Lazarus Group is linked to other recent heists, including the theft of $60 million from projects Aplhapo and CoinsPaid in July and the theft of $100 million from Atomic Wallet in June.
Over the past few years, the Lazarus Group from North Korea has grown to be a hindrance to numerous cryptocurrency projects. In June, the crypto analytics company Elliptic said that the Lazarus organization had committed multiple robberies totaling more than $2 billion in digital assets.
The Ronin Network, an Ethereum sidechain that is used by the play-to-earn cryptocurrency game Axie Infinity, was drained of $622 million in April, and the U.S. Treasury Department linked the hacker gang to it. One of the largest crypto breaches ever was this one.
The Lazarus outfit’s on-chain activities have had an impact on the coin-mixing protocol Tornado Cash as the North Korean hacker outfit has worked to hide its digital footprints. The program, which proponents claim is a privacy tool, was penalized by the Treasury Department last year for allegedly aiding in the laundering of $7 billion in cryptocurrencies.
In July, a federal judge upheld restrictions that forbade the use of Tornado Cash in the US, and in August, the US Justice Department detained one of the protocol’s co-founders.
Roman Storm was accused of conspiring to launder money, breaking sanctions, and running an unauthorized money-transfer operation.
Image: Wallpapers.com
Disclosure Statement: Miami Crypto does not take any external funding, or support to bring crypto news to the readers. We do not have any conflicts of interest while writing news stories on Miami Crypto.