Lazarus Group Behind $100 Million Harmony Bridge Hack

Confirmed: Lazarus Group Behind $100 Million Harmony Bridge Hack The FBI has confirmed the assertions made earlier this month by ZachXBT and others, indicating that the hackers are actively transferring a significant amount of the money using various privacy protocols.

The FBI has officially identified the Lazarus Group and APT38 as the perpetrators of the $100 million Harmony Bridge Hack from June 2022.

It was thought that the North Korean-affiliated cyber group was responsible for the incident, but had not been officially confirmed until now.

An FBI announcement dated Jan. 23 concluded that the investigation had verified that hackers linked to North Korea's government, the Lazarus Group and APT38, had managed to steal around $100 million worth of virtual currency from the Harmony's Horizon bridge.

In 2022, the Harmony Bridge hack occurred as a consequence of vulnerabilities in the Horizon Ethereum bridge of Harmony, through which the hackers were able to take away a selection of resources kept in the bridge by way of 11 transactions.

The FBI reported that North Korean hackers have been transferring funds worth around $60 million this month through the cryptocurrency platform RAILGUN, which uses the Ethereum protocol, providing anonymity to its users. This activity was first pointed out on Twitter by ZachXBT on January 16th.

CEO Changpeng Zhao reported that Binance was able to detect the hackers attempting to clean their illegally obtained funds through the Huobi crypto exchange. The company quickly acted to help Huobi freeze and acquire back the digital assets deposited by the hackers.

The FBI declared on Friday, January 13, 2023 that North Korean hackers had made use of RAILGUN, a security protocol, to move around $60 million worth of Ethereum that had been taken during a robbery in June, 2022. Several of the associated virtual asset providers collaborated with the FBI in order to freeze a segment of the ETH. The left over ETH was then sent out to distinct addresses.

The FBI stated that its cyber and virtual assets divisions, in collaboration with the U.S. Attorney's Office and the U.S. Justice Department's crypto unit, have been working to detect and stop North Korea from stealing and laundering virtual currency to finance its ballistic missile and Weapons of Mass Destruction programs.

The Lazarus Group is a notorious hacking collective that is believed to have been responsible for various major cyber incidents in the cryptocurrency space, such as the $600 million Ronin Bridge attack from March last year.

The United States Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control declared in April that the Lazarus Group had been added to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) list as a result of the hack.

In the same month, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent out an alarm regarding the Ronin Bridge attack, noting the North Korean state-sponsored cyber assaults that have been aimed at blockchain companies.