The North Korean hacker group Lazarus has recently turned the crypto assets to Bitcoin and turned into a huge BTC whale. According to Arkham Intelligence, the group reached a total of 13,518 BTCs using the funds he stole from the Bybit stock market. The total value of these assets is about $ 1.13 billion.
Lazarus holds more BTC than states
According to Bitbo’s data, the amount of Bitcoin in the hands of Lazarus Group passed the reserves of countries such as Bhutan and El Salvador. Bhutan is known to have 13,029 BTC and El Salvador has 6,089 BTC. Lazarus’s Bitcoin assets bring North Korea to the fifth country that holds the highest BTC after the USA, China, the United Kingdom and Ukraine.
According to Arkham Intelligence’s report, Lazarus turned the Ethereum he played to Bitcoin. In addition, there are 13,702 ETH (approximately 26 million dollars), 5,022 BNB ($ 3,16 million) and $ 2.2 million DAI in the group wallets.
Lazarus’ cyber attacks and new malicious software
According to Socket’s report, Lazarus developed a new malware called Beavertail to seize developer environments and target the crypto wallets. This software contains harmful packages that mimic legitimate Javascript libraries and targets the Exodus wallets with Solana.
It was also found that Lazarus used mixing services such as Tornado Cash to hide the funds stolen. On March 13, 400 ETH (approximately 750 thousand dollars) was sent to Tornado Cash. According to Elliptic’s report, North Korean -related hackers have stolen a total of $ 6 billion crypto currency since 2017, and most of these funds were used in the country’s ballistic missile program.
OKX took precautions against Lazarus
OKX temporarily disabled the AGGregator of the Web 3.0 -decentralized stock market (Dex) on March 17, to take precautions against Lazarus’s activities. The company announced that the hacker group has found that it has abused defi services.
According to Bloomberg’s report last week, it turned out that Lazarus laundered crypto currency worth $ 100 million using the OKX Dex aggregate. Following these developments, OKX announced that it has developed a system that follows and blocks the attackers’ addresses on the central stock market (CEX) system.
