Hackers, which conducted the $625 million Ronin bridge attack in March, have reportedly transferred majority of their funds from ETH into BTC through renBTC and Bitcoin privacy tools such as Blender and ChipMixer, as stated by Cointelegraph.
According to Cointelegraph, activities concerning the hacker has been tracked by on-chain investigator BliteZero, who works for SlowMist. The investigator contributed towards the company’s 2022 mid-year Blockchain Security report, and designed the transaction pathway of the stolen funds since the attack. Maximum amount of the stolen funds were originally converted into ETH and sent to authorised Ethereum cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, before being bridged over to the Bitcoin network and converted into BTC through the Ren protocol.
On the basis of information by Cointelegraph, the report stated that hackers, believed to be part of North Korean cybercrime organisation Lazarus Group, initially moved a part of the fund (6,249 ETH) to centralised exchanges such as Huobi (5,028 ETH) and FTX (1,219 ETH). From the centralised exchanges, the 6,249 ETH were converted into BTC, after which the hackers transferred 439 BTC ($20.5 million) to Bitcoin privacy tool Blender upon approval by the US Treasury. However, majority of stolen funds (175,000 ETH) was transferred Tornado Cash within a period. Hackers made use of decentralised exchanges Uniswap and 1inch convert close to 113,000 ETH to renBTC, and used Ren’s decentralised cross-chain bridge to transfer assets from Ethereum to Bitcoin network and unwrap the renBTC to BTC.
Moreover, Cointelegraph noted that around 6,631 BTC was distributed to a variety of centralised exchanges and decentralised protocols. The report also mentioned that the Ronin hackers withdrew 2,871 BTC (of the 3,460 BTC), which showed an amount of $61.6 million, through Bitcoin privacy tool ChipMixer. BlitZero provided conclusion to the Twitter thread by stating that the Ronin hacks is yet to be investigated, and progress is required to be made.
(With insights from Cointelegraph)
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