Bybit CEO Reveals $1.4B Hack Update

According to Ben Zhou, Bybit CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, 27.95% of the money lost in the $1.4 billion scam created by the North Korean Lazarus Group is now lost or untraceable.

“A total of USD 1.4 billion, or almost 500k ETH, was stolen. 27.59% have gone black, 3.84% have frozen, and 68.57% are still traceable. In an executive summary posted on X on Monday, Zhou stated that the untraceable cash mainly went into mixers before passing via bridges to P2P and OTC markets.

According to the post, the untraceable funds were first moved into mixers before being transferred via bridges to P2P (peer-to-peer) and OTC (over-the-counter) platforms. A portion of the funds then went into other mixers, such as Railgun, Tornado Cash, and CryptoMixer, after a specific amount of Bitcoin was washed off using Wasabi, a cryptocurrency mixer.

The final step involved turning these illegal monies into more liquid assets after the malevolent entity carried out several cross-chain swaps using Thorchain, eXch, Lombard, LiFi, Stargate, and SunSwap.

By acquiring “control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferring all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address,” the North Korea-affiliated Lazarus Group drained 500,000 ether (ETH) from Bybit during a February attack.

According to forensics, 432,748 ETH, or 84.45% of the compromised funds, were moved from ether to bitcoin using Thorchain. Interestingly, 342,975 ETH, or around $960.33 million, or 67.25% of these money, have been converted into 10,003 BTC and dispersed among 35,772 wallets, with an average of 0.28 BTC per wallet.

Additionally, 5,991 ETH, or around $16.77 million, or 1.17% of the total money, are still stored on the Ethereum blockchain in 12,490 wallets.

Last but not least, in just two months, 5,443 bounty reports have been submitted to the Lazarus Bounty program, 70 of which have been accepted. The exchange, according to Zhou, requires “more bounty hunters that can decode mixers as we need a lot of help there down the road.”

 

 

 

 

 

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