North Korean hackers behind $100 million crypto theft, FBI says
Christopher Hutton
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North Korean hackers were behind the theft of $100 million of cryptocurrency assets in 2022, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The federal agency announced on Tuesday that it was “able to confirm” that the North Korea-affiliated Lazarus Group and APT38 were both involved in the hack of the Horizon Bridge, a tool for transferring digital assets from one type of blockchain to another, and had used it to steal more than $100 million from users.
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“The Lazarus Group and APT38, cyber actors associated with the Democratic Republic of North Korea (DPRK), are responsible for the theft of $100m of virtual currency from Harmony’s Horizon bridge, reported on June 24,” the FBI stated in a report. The law enforcement agency also said that the hackers used the Railgun system, a system to ensure anonymity while moving cryptocurrency, to launder more than $60 million in Ethereum.
While blockchain analytics firms had alleged that Lazarus had been involved in the hack, this is the first confirmation of North Korean involvement. The FBI said it intends to continue “to identify and disrupt North Korea’s theft and laundering of virtual currency, which is used to support North Korea’s ballistic missile and Weapons of Mass Destruction programs.”
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Lazarus and APT38 have previously been accused of organizing the theft of $638 million in crypto assets through the Ronin blockchain, a shared database for tracking transactions of the Ethereum cryptocurrency apart from the main Ethereum blockchain. The database was operated by the same people behind Axie Infinity, a popular video game.
The Lazarus Group is a notorious hacker group blamed for several high-profile hacks, including the 2014 Sony Pictures breach, distributed denial-of-service attacks against South Korean and U.S. websites in 2009, and a ransomware attack in 2017 against more than 200,000 computers in 150 countries. The group is considered a “state-sponsored hacking organization,” according to the FBI.