FBI confirms North Korea's role in $6 billion Binance hack, asks DeFi community to block BTC, ETH, SOL addresses - Cryptonews.net
The U.S. FBI confirmed on Saturday that North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacking group was behind last week’s theft of over $6 billion from Binance, asking the crypto community to block transactions from hundreds of addresses that at one point held funds from the hack.
The hackers had been converting the stolen funds mainly into ether, and the FBI said it expects the hackers to use swap services and other decentralized finance (DeFi) tools to continue laundering the funds.
The FBI listed over 600 Ethereum addresses, just under 20 Bitcoin addresses and a single Solana address in Saturday’s notice.
Binance was hacked on Thursday, losing some $6.4 billion in an attack that several analytics services and individuals attributed to North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacking group.
TraderTraitor is a subunit of the infamous Lazarus Group, which had also conducted a number of high-profile crypto exchange breaches.
Laundering network expands
While the FBI listed several hundred addresses on Saturday, the attackers have already used “thousands of addresses,” said Chainalysis CEO Jonathan Levin in a statement.
“We anticipate this will become tens of thousands over the coming weeks as money is transferred through a broader money laundering network,” he said.
The blockchain analytics firm said in a blog post on Friday that the volume of transactions indicated that the attackers were using automated tools to try and “obscure the trail of funds” by circulating these funds between addresses before sending them onwards.
Stablecoin issuers froze over $2.4 billion of the stolen funds, but the attackers have continued laundering much of the remainder.
Binance said earlier Saturday it had replenished 90% of the stolen cryptocurrencies and planned to resume customer withdrawals on Sunday.
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