North Korea may be behind $100 million cryptocurrency hack – Asia and Pacific

North Korean hackers are most probably behind an assault final week that stole as a lot as $100 million in cryptocurrency from a US firm, three digital investigative corporations have concluded.

The cryptoassets have been stolen on June 23 from Horizon Bridge, a service operated by the Concord blockchain that enables property to be transferred to different blockchains.

Since then, exercise by the hackers suggests they could be linked to North Korea, which consultants say is among the many most prolific cyber attackers. UN sanctions screens says Pyongyang makes use of the stolen funds to assist its nuclear and missile programmes.

The model of assault and excessive velocity of structured funds to a mixer – used to obscure the origin of funds – is much like earlier assaults that have been attributed to North Korea-linked actors, Chainalysis, a blockchain agency working with Concord to research the assault, mentioned on Twitter on Tuesday.

That conclusion was echoed by different investigators.

“Preliminarily this appears to be like like a North Korean hack primarily based on transaction behaviour,” mentioned Nick Carlsen, a former FBI analyst who now investigates North Korea’s cryptocurrency heists for TRM Labs, a US-based agency.

There are robust indications that North Korea’s Lazarus Group could also be chargeable for this theft, primarily based on the character of the hack and the following laundering of the stolen funds, one other agency, Elliptic, mentioned in a report on Thursday.

“The thief is making an attempt to interrupt the transaction path again to the unique theft,” the report mentioned. “This makes it simpler to money out the funds at an trade.”

If confirmed, the assault could be the eighth exploit this 12 months – totalling $1 billion in stolen funds – that could possibly be attributed to North Korea with confidence, accounting for 60 p.c of complete funds stolen in 2022, Chainalysis mentioned.

North Korea’s capability to money in on its stolen property could have been sophisticated by the latest drop in cryptocurrency values, consultants and South Korean officers instructed Reuters, presumably threatening a key supply of funding for the sanctions-strapped nation.