North Korea’s Lazarus Group Is Stealing Crypto Worth Almost $3 Million Every Day

On Sep 14, 2023

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North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group has hacked crypto worth almost $3 million every day in the past three months.

The state-sponsored group has hacked five victims for a total haul of $293 million worth of crypto in the 100 days since June 7, according to a calculation by InsideBitcoins.

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic estimates that as of June it had stolen total crypto assets worth more than $2 billion since its first heists more than a decade ago. It’s largest ever attack was on Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge, which lost a whopping $625 million in a hack last year.

The group has also been linked to the $100 million Harmony Bridge hack in June 2022 and the $190 million Nomad Bridge hack just a month later.

Here are sketches of its five most recent hacks:

Atomic Wallet

Of the five most recent hacks, the largest was on Atomic Wallet that led to the loss of $ 100 million worth of crypto assets.

The attack, which took place in June, was first reported as a loss of $35 million. After further investigation by Elliptic, the loss was concluded to be a staggering $100 million stolen from over 5,000 crypto wallets on the platform.

Alphapo

The following month, Lazarus Group struck again, this time hitting Alphapo, a centralized crypto payment provider for online platforms. The initial reported stolen amount was $23 million in the form of various cryptocurrencies.

Later, well-known crypto chain investigator “ZackXBT” reported that an additional $37 million worth of TRON and BTC had been tracked, bringing the total to $60 million.

Hack update: An additional $37M stolen on TRON & BTC from this hack has been located.
This now brings the total amount stolen to $60M.
This hack appears to likely have been done by Lazarus as they create a very distinct fingerprint on-chain. pic.twitter.com/ACGSXiDwW3
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) July 25, 2023

CoinsPaid

At the same time, the hacker group was also blamed for the loss of at least $37 million from Estonian crypto-payments service provider CoinsPaid. “We believe Lazarus expected the attack on CoinsPaid to be much more successful,” the company said in a statement, adding that customers’ funds were safe.

Stake.com

Early this month, the group was confirmed by the FBI to have orchestrated an attack against Stake.com, an online casino and betting platform. The Drake-backed platform had lost $41 million in an exploit that targeted the platform’s funds on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, and Bitcoin networks.

In a statement, the FBI said that it “has confirmed that this theft took place on or about September 4, 2023, and attributes it to the Lazarus Group (also known as APT38) which is comprised of DPRK cyber actors.”

CoinEX

In its most recent attack, the Lazarus group launched a hack against crypto exchange CoinEx, which drained several wallets of various tokens including Bitcoin, Ethereum, TRX, Arbitrum, MATIC, and others.

The attack was first reported on September 12 with the loss totaling $27 million. The amount has quickly ballooned to more than $55 million as more affected wallets have been identified by the exchange.

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