Hackers that stole about $ 1.4 billion in encryption by Crypto Exchange Bybit have moved almost all revenue from all revenue and turning them into bitcoin to what experts call the first phase of the Low money labor.
On February 21, Bybit said a “refined attack” on one of the company’s wallets resulted in the theft of 401,346 Ethereum, worth about $ 1.4 billion at the moment, in what is the largest cryptocurrency theft in history and possibly the biggest robbery. Blockchain researchers and FBI researchers, as well as the FBI, accused North Korea of being behind the hack.
From the digital robbery, hackers have moved all the Ethereum that have stolen from the dozens of cryptographic wallets that initially divide the revenue between and have turned most of the funds into Bitcoin, according to Tom Robinson, co -founder and lead scientist at Eliptic Crypt. And Ari Redbord, a former federal prosecutor and a senior official at the Treasury, who is now a global head of TRM Labs policy, also a blockchain monitoring company.
Andrew Fierman, head of National Security Intelligence at Blockchain Monitoring Company, told TechCrunch that the company is watching about 90% of stolen funds, “the majority of which have been converted into [Bitcoin] and held in ~ 4,400 addresses. ”
“The remaining ~ 10% of stolen funds have been lost by fees/free/off-ramped,” the company said. Off -ramp They are services that convert CRYPTO into cash.
During this first phase between February 24 and March 2, North Korea hackers took steps to conceal the origin of the stolen encryption. According to Redbord, hackers did it mainly based on Thorswap, a decentralized protocol that allows users to exchange assets in different blockchains “without the need for intermediate”.
These legitimacy steps, Redbord said, showed an “unprecedented level of operational performance” by the hackers.
“This rapid legitimacy suggests that North Korea has either expanded the infrastructure of its money or that underground financial networks, especially in China, have enhanced their ability to absorb and process illegal funds,” Redbord said. “The scale and speed of this business are new challenges for researchers, as traditional anti -money laundering (AML) mechanisms are struggling to keep up with the large volume of illegal transactions.”
At the same time, both Redbord and Robinson said this is just the beginning for the hackers.
“They still have a way to benefit from these funds,” Robinson told TechCrunch.
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Redbord explained that, for the time being, the second phase implies the deposition of “initial delivery” of stolen funds – now Bitcoin – in a mixer, which is designed to “create doubts in the detection process” for investigators. Encryption mixer (or tumblers) are services designed to hide the origin and destination of one’s encryption by involvement with other users’ chapters.
“Until this point virtually anyone with patience and willingness could follow the flow of Bybit capital. But mitters are major obstacles for most researchers,” Robinson said.
However, Redbord noted that gums usually receive a volume of a few million to $ 10 million a day, so “whether these mixers can continue to absorb the amount of money in the game is an open question”.
In other words, while hackers received a significant, record-wide amount from Bybit, it is still unclear how much of the hackers will be able to turn into cash.
But there is still hope for Bybit to recover some of them, according to Robinson.
“It is likely that at least some of these funds will pass through exchanges, where they could potentially be frozen,” Redbord said. “It’s just a question of whether these exchanges know quickly to handle stolen assets.”
After Hack, Bybit offered a total generosity of $ 140 million to anyone who could help detect the funds and freeze them, a process that prevents anyone else from accessing the funds. The company said it would pay 5% of the recovered funds in the “entity that successfully frozen the funds” and 5% to anyone who first mentioned the funds and led to frozen. From this writing, bybit has only awarded $ 4.3 million to 19 generosity hunters, according to The official page of generosity.
Bybit did not respond to a request for comments.
