The FBI accused the Lazarus and APT38 hacking groups of the attack on the Horizon Bridge company. Billions of dollars were lost due to the crosschain bridge hack.
Two hacking groups linked to North Korea are responsible for stealing $100 million in an attack on a crypto service in 2022.
In a statement from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, hackers from Lazarus and APT38 launched an attack on US blockchain company Harmony’s Horizon Bridge last June. Bloomberg writes about it.
Horizon is a software that allows a crypto token to move between different blockchains. According to Chainalysis, in 13 separate breaches of such inter-network bridges in 2022, around $2 billion worth of crypto-assets were stolen.
The FBI says that on January 13, hackers linked to North Korea used a privacy protocol called Railgun to launder $60 million worth of Ethereum cryptocurrency. The FBI added that some of them were sent to several crypto exchanges and converted to Bitcoin.
Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance Holdings, announced last week that his firm helped the Huobi platform freeze part of its funds and return 124 bitcoins.
Previously, the hacking group Lazarus was also accused of hacking the Ronin Bridge, which led to the theft of $600 million worth of crypto-assets.
Cryptocurrency market – latest news
As reported, last week the cryptocurrency market was shocked by the news of the collapse of one of the leading companies in this industry – Genesis. Its credit division has already filed for bankruptcy in the US. Genesis lenders could lose between $1 billion and $10 billion in deposits amid the final freeze on payouts. In total, the company served about 100,000 customers.
The first problems with payments from Genesis Global Capital began on November 16, 2022: then the company decided to temporarily freeze them against the background of the bankruptcy of another leading player in the crypto market – FTX. Earlier, The Wall Street Journal conducted an investigation, in the framework of which it found out the manipulations of the stock exchange. FTX used its assets to finance the failed operations of a related company, Alameda Research.
Meanwhile, on January 14, the value of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency exceeded $21,000 for the first time since the beginning of November. The second largest token Etherium also showed growth. Among other things, the crypto market was helped by the news about the return of assets in the amount of 5 billion dollars of the FTX exchange.
According to CoinDesk, at the time of writing, the price of Bitcoin is $22,901, while Etherium can be bought for $1,620.
