North Korea’s Lazarus Group has recently laundered 62,200 Ether, valued at around $138 million, from the Bybit hack that took place on February 21. A crypto analyst shared that this leaves 156,500 Ether still to be moved.
Out of the 499,000 Ether stolen in the Bybit incident, about 343,000 has already been transferred. This means the group has moved 68.7% of the funds, a jump from 54% just a few days ago. The analyst expects the remaining amounts will likely be cleared within the next three days.
Previously, the laundering attempts appeared to slow down after the FBI reached out to node operators and crypto exchanges. They urged them to block any transactions connected to the Bybit hackers. The FBI has identified 51 Ethereum addresses associated with these hackers, and blockchain analytics firm Elliptic has flagged over 11,000 wallet addresses as potentially involved.
The hackers have also swapped some of the stolen Ether for Bitcoin, Dai, and other assets using decentralized exchanges and cross-chain services that don’t require identity verification. One such service is THORChain, which has faced criticism for enabling these transactions. A developer from THORChain, “Pluto,” stated they would stop contributing to the protocol after a decision to block North Korean-linked transactions was undone.
The founder of THORChain, John-Paul Thorbjornsen, clarified that he is no longer involved with the project and emphasized that none of the addresses linked to the recent sanctions had interacted with THORChain.
The $1.4 billion Bybit hack is the largest exploit in the crypto world to date, significantly surpassing the $650 million Ronin bridge hack from March 2022. The fallout from this incident continues to raise concerns about security and regulation within the cryptocurrency space.
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