Cryptocurrency change Bybit’s CEO Ben Zhou stated that 27.95% of the funds misplaced within the $1.4 billion exploit engineered by the North Korean Lazarus Group have gone darkish or develop into untraceable.
“Whole hacked funds of USD 1.4bn round 500k ETH. 68.57% stay traceable, 27.59% have gone darkish, 3.84% have been frozen. The untraceable funds primarily flowed into mixers then by way of bridges to P2P and OTC platforms,” Zhou stated in an govt abstract printed on X on Monday.
The untraceable funds have been moved into mixers earlier than being transferred by way of bridges to P2P (peer-to-peer) and OTC (over-the-counter) platforms, the publish defined, mentioning using Wasabi, a crypto mixer, to scrub off a specific amount of BTC, following which a portion of those funds entered into different mixers, together with Railgun, Twister Money and CryptoMixer.
The malicious entity then executed a number of cross-chain swaps by way of Thorchain, eXch, Lombard, LiFi, Stargate and SunSwap, with the ultimate stage involving the conversion of those illicit funds into extra liquid belongings.
The North Korea-linked Lazarus Group hacked Bybit in February, draining 500,000 ether (ETH) by taking “management of the precise ETH chilly pockets and transferring all of the ETH within the chilly pockets to this unidentified handle.”
Forensics reveal that of the hacked funds, a complete of 432,748 ETH, representing 84.45%, has been transferred from ether to bitcoin by way of Thorchain. Notably, 67.25% of those funds, amounting to 342,975 ETH (round $960.33 million), has been transformed into 10,003 BTC and distributed throughout 35,772 wallets with a mean of 0.28 BTC per pockets.
Additional, 1.17% of the funds, or 5,991 ETH (roughly $16.77 million), stays on the Ethereum blockchain, stashed throughout 12,490 wallets.
Lastly, the Lazarus Bounty initiative has acquired 5,443 bounty experiences in two months, of which, 70 have been deemed legitimate. Zhou stated the change wants “extra bounty hunters that may decode mixers as we’d like a variety of assist there down the street.”