North Korea’s Lazarus Group Holds $47 Million in Cryptocurrencies, Most Of It Bitcoin

The infamous Lazarus Group, a state-backed North Korean cybercrime entity, holds $47 million in cryptocurrencies, primarily Bitcoin (BTC). 

That’s in accordance with knowledge collected by 21.co subsidary Dune Analytics, which reveals the group’s wallets include roughly $42.5 million in BTC, $1.9 million in Ether (ETH), $1.1 million in Binance Coin (BNB), and an extra $640,000 in stablecoins, with Binance USD (BUSD) dominant.

However the quantity marks a big lower from the $86 million it held shortly after its hack of Stake.com. The Dune dashboard tracks 295 wallets related to the hacking group which were recognized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Workplace of Overseas Property Management (OFAC), the report stated.

Regardless of accumulating a considerable quantity of cryptocurrency, the Lazarus Group tends to keep away from utilizing privacy-focused cash resembling Monero, Sprint, or Zcash. These cryptocurrencies are identified for offering enhanced anonymity and making it difficult to hint transactions and customers. 

The digital wallets linked to the Lazarus are nonetheless fairly lively, with the newest transaction going down as lately as September 20, the report stated.

The group could maintain much more crypto as a result of the estimate is a conservative approximation primarily based on publicly accessible knowledge, it stated.

Lazarus Has Stolen $3 Million Crypto A Day In Final 100 Days

InsideBitcoins reported earlier that the Lazarus has persistently been finishing up cyberattacks, managing to grab practically $3 million price of cryptocurrencies every day for the previous three months. The state-sponsored group stole $293 million in numerous digital currencies in simply 100 days since June 7. Probably the most important incident concerned the theft of $100 million from Atomic Pockets, initially reported as a $35 million loss, however later adjusted upwards following an intensive investigation

Lazarus, labeled a “state-sponsored hacking group” by the FBI, was additionally linked to a CoinEx cryptocurrency trade hack that stole $55 million. This hyperlink was established when the group unintentionally disclosed an tackle that matched these related to prior safety breaches, together with the incidents involving Stake and Optimism.

It seems North Korea can also be chargeable for the $54M @coinexcom hack from yesterday after they by chance related their tackle to the $41M Stake hack on OP & Polygon.

0x75497999432b8701330fb68058bd21918c02ac59 pic.twitter.com/9qZPdc3yhT

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) September 13, 2023

Lazarus Group  has additionally been linked by the FBI to different a number of thefts involving digital currencies, resembling these focusing on Alphapo, CoinsPaid, and Atomic Pockets. 

North Korean hackers have taken practically $2 billion in digital currencies since 2018 by greater than 30 cyberattacks, together with $1 billion in 2022 alone, says blockchain intelligence agency TRM Labs. 

Important Drop in North Korean Hacker-Linked Crypto Thefts

However Chainalysis reported that thefts linked to hackers from North Korea up to now this 12 months have plunged 80% in comparison with the entire of final 12 months. As of mid-September, these hacker teams had managed to steal a mixed complete of $340.4 million in cryptocurrency, marking a big lower from the $1.65 billion price of digital property taken in 2022.

Earlier this month, the U.S. authorities issued a warning that the Lazarus targets healthcare services in Europe and the US.

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