Binance, Huobi freeze $1.4m of crypto tied to North Korean hackers

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Crypto exchanges BINANCE and Huobi have frozen accounts linked to a $100 million (?83m) hack carried out by Lazarus Group, a hacking group located in North Korea, in June 2022.

Nearly $1.4 million ($1.17 million) of cryptography has been frozen in the two bursaries that were stolen last year as part of an attack on the bridge of the harmonious horizon.

The accounts were identified following an investigation by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, according to a 14 February report from the company. We still don't know which coins or chips have been frozen.

Elliptic said that he warned Binance and Huobi about accounts, which every exchange then quickly took down:

The stolen funds remained dormant until very recently, when our investigators began to see them channelled through complex transaction chains, towards trading. By quickly informing these platforms of these illegal deposits, they could suspend these accounts and freeze the funds."

The Lazarus Group has used Tornado Cash, a decentralized crypto tumbler that makes crypto assets more difficult to track, to mask the trail leading to its original Harmony Horizon flight.

The tornado's cash flow was sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (ofac) in August 2022 after pretending to have facilitated $7 billion (?5.8 billion) counterfeit cryptocurrency.

Despite attempts by the Lazarus group, Elliptic was able to trace every stolen trust sent by the rocker to their new addresses.

Simone Maini, CEO at Elliptic, said its investigation demonstrates the crypto industry is against crypto becoming a “haven” for illicit activity:

“Today, money laundering was detected and stolen funds linked to North Korea were frozen, in real time. Our industry has the power and responsibility to ensure that digital assets do not become safe havens for money launderers and penalty fraudsters, to make them a force of good."

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation found that the Lazarus Group was responsible for the attack on the Harmony Bridge on January 24.

A week before, binance and huobi worked together to freeze and recover 121 bitcoin related to the onslaught of harmony.

Since Lazarus Group began focusing on cryptocurrency in 2017, the organisation has stolen more than $2 billion (?1.66bn) of crypto, according to Elliptic estimates.