Blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis stated that law enforcement department recently made a recovery of $30 million worth stolen cryptocurrency from the $625 million Ronin Bridge hack in March, as reported by Cointelegraph.
According to Cointelegraph, going by insights from Chainalysis, Lazarus Group, the North Korean-based entity deemed responsible for the attacks, first used money laundering techniques such as sending stolen Ether (ETH) to cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash to swap it for Bitcoin (BTC), then sent it to Tornado Cash, and finally cashed it out at exchanges. However, the group made the call of moving away from such techniques after sanctions were imposed by US Department of Treasury on Tornado Cash wallet addresses.
On the basis of information by Cointelegraph, Chainalysis emphasised that for responding, Lazarus Group hackers switched to stolen cryptocurrency laundering through cross-chain bridges on actual decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms. The firm pointed towards to a transaction where stolen funds were bridged to the BNB chain backed by Ethereum, then made the change for Tron’ stablecoin USDD, and finally bridged to the BitTorrent blockchain.
Moreover, Cointelegraph noted that Lazarus Group primarily hacked five out of nine private keys kept by transaction validators for Ronin Network’s cross-chain bridge. Being able to gain majority consensus, the group affirmed two transactions for transferring 173,600 ETH and 25 million USD Coin (USDC) out of Ronin Bridge. Post that incident, Binance has been able to get back $5.8 million in funds related to the Ronin exploit. Four months later, Ronin developers made the announcement that the cross-chain bridge was back after three audits. Sky Mavis, developer, Ronin, clocked more than $150 million in a Binance-backed round to redesign the protocol.
Going by Cointelegraph’s website, founded in 2013, it is a digital media resource covering news on blockchain technology, cryptocurrency assets, and emerging financial technology (fintech) trends.
(With insights from Cointelegraph)
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