FBI Confirms Lazarus Group Was Behind $100m Harmony Hack

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has confirmed that North Korea’s Lazarus Team and APT28 have been behind the $100m theft from cryptocurrency organization Harmony unveiled in June 2022.

Producing in its official site on Monday, the Bureau mentioned it spotted the North Korean cyber actors working with the privacy protocol Railgun to launder more than $60m truly worth of Ethereum (ETH) stolen throughout the heist.

“A portion of this stolen Ethereum was subsequently sent to numerous virtual asset support vendors and transformed to bitcoin (BTC),” reads the put up.

The FBI also claimed that when some of these resources had been frozen (in coordination with some digital asset services vendors), the remaining Bitcoin at some point moved to 11 identified addresses.

“FBI Los Angeles and FBI Charlotte […] proceed to discover and disrupt North Korea’s theft and laundering of digital currency, which is utilised to help North Korea’s ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction applications,” the Bureau wrote.

According to Kevin Bocek, VP of security approach and menace intelligence at Venafi, Lazarus is regarded for stealing cryptocurrency by exploiting equipment identities, so the attribution of the Harmony attack is not shocking.

“When disclosing the breach, Harmony offered evidence that its private keys – a main element of machine identity – were being compromised, opening the door to Lazarus and enabling it to decrypt information and siphon off cash. This displays the electricity of equipment identities falling into the mistaken palms.”

Even more, Bocek stated that Venafi’s study showed that attacks from North Korean threat groups are often financial.

“Cybercrime has turn out to be an vital cog in the survival of Kim’s dictatorship, enabling North Korea to evade worldwide sanctions and fund its weapons courses,” the security expert added.

“Any corporation that features a money gain to North Korean risk groups could be a focus on, specifically in the fairly unregulated cryptocurrency market.”

The reality that the Lazarus Team could be behind the $100m Harmony hack was very first suggested by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic times after the breach was disclosed.

Additional recently, the danger actors had been connected with the exploitation of a Dell driver vulnerability and a series of macOS malware bacterial infections.

Some parts of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com