The US Treasury Department has accused North Korean hacking group Lazarus of stealing around $625 million in crypto from the Axie Infinity-linked Ronin bridge, reportedly the biggest crypto heist ever.
The Treasury Department added an Ethereum address to its sanctions list on Thursday. A wallet profiler had marked the wallet as “Ronin Bridge Exploiter”.
Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency analytics outfit, stated that the address “was implicated in the Ronin hack.” Elliptic, a tracing agency, calculated that over 14 per cent of the stolen assets had already been laundered by Friday.
Chainanlysis has also released a detailed explanation of the same in a tweet thread.
https://twitter.com/chainalysis/status/1514645221027594245
According to a Ronin Network blog post, the FBI has connected Lazarus to the validator breach, and the US Treasury Department has sanctioned the payments. “We are still in the process of adding additional security measures before redeploying the Ronin Bridge to mitigate future risk,” the blog stated.
Last month, the sidechain Ronin, which is connected to the main Ethereum blockchain and utilized by developers of the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis, was hacked, resulting in the theft of 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC, totalling a whopping $625 million at the time. It is noteworthy that this is considered the biggest crypto heist ever. The US Treasury’s sanctions division has also banned a purported cryptocurrency wallet held by Lazarus for the first time.