North Korea’s Lazarus Group Behind The 100 Million USD Harmony Hack, Says Federal Bureau of Investigation

Lazarus Group and APT 38, 2 hacking groups with ties to North Korea, were responsible for a hundred million dollars Harmony Hack in the month of June, as per the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The North Korea-linked cyber group had long been doubted of being behind the attack but their involvement had not been confirmed by authorities until now.

The Harmony Bridge hack last year was the result of security holes in Harmony’s Horizon Ethereum bridge that permitted the cyber attackers to swipe a number of assets stored in the bridge by means of eleven transactions.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also outlined that the North Korean hackers began shifting around sixty million dollars worth of the stolen funds earlier this month by means of Ethereum-based privacy protocol RAILGUN. Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT earlier highlighted such via Twitter last month on 16th January.

Outstandingly, cryptocurrency exchange Binance discovered that the hackers were trying to launder the funds through the Huobi digital asset exchange, and then immediately assisted it in freezing and recovering the virtual currencies deposited by the hackers, as per the exchange’s CEO Changpeng Zhao.

In its statement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation mentioned its cyber and digital assets units, as well as the United States Attorney’s Office and the United States Justice Department’s digital asset unit, have continued “to identify and disrupt North Korea’s theft and laundering of virtual currency, which is used to support North Korea’s ballistic missile and Weapons of Mass Destruction programs”.