Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Crypto Exchange Bybit, said more than two-thirds of the digital assets stolen from the platform in February by the North Korean Lazarus Group, is still trackable.
In the executive summary of the hacked bat fund, published on X on April 21, Ben Zhou said a total of $1.4 billion hacking, 68.6% “remaining traceable”, 27.6% “darkened” and 3.8% frozen.
Untraceable funds flowed mainly into the mixers, then from the bridge to peer-to-peer, commercial platforms, he added.
In February, hackers associated with the Lazarus Group exploited vulnerabilities in Bibit's cold wallet infrastructure, stealing $1.4 billion in the largest crypto exchange hack to date.
“We recently observed that the mixer used primarily by DPRK (DPRK) is wasabi,” Zhou said, following BTC wasabi washing, “a small portion of it has entered Cryptomixer, Tornado Cash and Railgun.”
Zhou has confirmed that 944 Bitcoin (BTC) has passed a wasabi mixer worth around $90 million. He said multiple cross-chain and swap services will be run through platforms such as Thorchain, Exchain, Lombard, Li.fi, Stargate, Sunswap and more, and will eventually enter P2P and OTC services.
In addition, about 84% of the total worth around $12.1 billion (ETH) has moved from Ethereum to Bitcoin via Thorchain. About two-thirds of that (approximately $960 million worth of ether) have been converted to 10,003 BTC over 35,772 wallets, he added.
Approximately $17 million worth of ether remains in the Ethereum blockchain, spanning 12,490 wallets, Zhou reported.
Bybit pays a bounty of about $2.3 million
Zhou also revealed that of the 5,443 reports received in the last 60 days, only 70 are valid.
Bybit launched the Lazarus Bounty program in February, offering a total of $140 million in compensation for information that leads to funds being frozen.
To date, they have paid 12 bounty hunters $2.3 million. Most of this went to one entity, the Mantle Layer-2 platform, where the efforts resulted in a frozen fund worth $42 million.
Related: Lazarus Group's 2024 suspension was relocated with a $1.4 billion Bibit Hack
“We welcome more reports. We need a bounty hunter who can decode the mixer, because there's a lot of help out there,” Zhou said.
On April 17, Crypto Exchange announced it would halt operations on May 1 after claiming that the company was used to wash funds from the Buybit Hack.
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