These hackers aren’t wasting time admiring their work. They’ve already laundered over $400 million in the first week—$200 million in just 48 hours. That’s money moving faster than gossip in a small town.
Traditional mixing services? Too small. North Korea’s using what experts call a “flood the zone” technique, overwhelming tracking efforts with simultaneous transactions across multiple blockchains.
Bybit isn’t taking this lying down. They’ve offered a 10% bounty on recovered funds, paying out over $4 million to helpful crypto sleuths so far. About $42 million (a measly 3%) of the stolen assets have been frozen.
Meanwhile, nervous clients withdrew $4 billion within two days of the hack. Talk about a vote of no confidence.
The attack exposed serious vulnerabilities in cold wallet systems and multi-signature authorization. Guess those weren’t quite as secure as everyone thought. Shocker.
North Korea’s been busy. They’ve stolen over $5 billion in cryptocurrency since 2017, funding a regime that can’t seem to make money any legitimate way. The FBI has identified the cybercrime gang as TraderTraitor, their official designation for the notorious Lazarus Group.
The Lazarus Group—their go-to hackers—have upgraded from counterfeiting cash to digital theft. More profitable. Less paper cuts.
The hackers compromised Bybit’s system through a supply chain attack targeting the Safe{Wallet} infrastructure used for transactions.
The cryptocurrency community could implement smart contracts that automatically enforce security rules to prevent such attacks in the future.
The FBI has released wallet addresses linked to the stolen funds and is practically begging the crypto community to help block transactions. They want information sharing. They want collaboration. They want anything that might stop this money from vanishing forever.
Time is running out. With each passing day, more funds disappear into North Korea’s increasingly sophisticated laundering network.
And once it’s gone? It’s gone for good.
