One of the Largest Hacks Ever? But Will The Hackers Be Able To Launder The Gains?

Bybit has been hit by one of the largest hacks ever in human history, and it is thought that hackers managed to steal over $1.4 billion worth of ETH from their cold wallet (500,000 ETH). Overall, it would make the hackers the largest owner of Ether, and which beats Vitalik Bukerin who has 250,000 ETH.

It is thought to have been conducted by North Korea’s Lazarus Group and follows other attacks on WazirX and Radiant. The WazirX attack targeted multi-sig wallets — on 18 July 2024 — and resulted in a loss of more than $230 million [here], and the Radiant 16 Oct 2024 attack resulted in a $50 million loss [here].

This was achieved through a masked URL and which deceived wallet holders into approving transactions, and allowed for an alteration of the smart contact logic which controlled the cold wallet. As with the previous attacks, the weakness is relates to the multisig setup.

Overall, the incident caused ETH to dip in the market, but it has since recovered and has made gains [here]:

One of the challenges for the hackers is to cash out the Ether, which could be monitored within the main exchanges. There are already signs that North Koreans have begun to launder the stolen ETH. In the following, we see a request for a range of addresses that will be blocked.

One of the wallets has been marked by Bitby [here]:

Here is one of the transactions [here]:

Bitby have been quick to put a lock on certain wallets, and will aim to set the hackers from cashing in on their loses.