Harmony Bridge Hack, Lazarus Group Transferred $63.5M

Everyone seems to be getting off to a slow start at work at the start of the year. However, hackers are constantly busy. Lazarus Group, a North Korean organization, was recently discovered to be transferring stolen money through exchanges and platforms for unlawful withdrawals.

ZachXBT, an on-chain detective, claims that Lazarus Group approved one transaction with a total value of up to $63.5 million (or 41,000 ETH). The cash were stolen via the Harmony bridge hack and transferred through Railgun before being combined and deposited on three other exchanges.

In order to prevent the source of the cash from being tracked, the group splits the funds and switches between numerous wallet addresses, as shown in the picture below.

Previously, in June, it was announced that hackers had breached Harmony's Horizon cross-chain bridge, causing initial damage that was initially pegged at much to $100 million. The attacker only managed to breach the bridge to Ethereum; the connection to Bitcoin is still secure.

Despite this, the project paused Horizon in order to look into the flaw and alert exchanges to stop money laundering by hackers. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, once stated that cross-chain solutions could not be trusted due to numerous flaws in the functioning mechanism.

Following extensive tracking data on the monies that had been stolen, sources named Lazarus Group as the group responsible for the hack. The transaction trail is hidden using mixers like Tornado Cash.

The Harmony blockchain project team has suggested that up to 4.97 billion of its native cryptocurrency ONE be created in order to make up for the victims of the attack. Members of the community have reacted negatively to the idea in huge numbers, with many voicing worries that the asset would experience inflationary pressure and lose value as a result of the large-scale issuing of new tokens.