On October 4, 2024, the U.S. government filed two lawsuits to seize more than $2.67 million worth of digital assets linked to notorious hacker group Lazarus. The digital assets were stolen in two high-profile hacks targeting options exchange Deribit in 2022 and gambling platform Stake.com in 2023.
According to court documents, the U. S. government wants to recover about $1.7 million in tephyr (USDT) stolen in the 2022 Deribit hack, which cost the #cryptocurrency options exchange $28 million. In the hack, Lazarus Group hacked Deribit's hot wallet and routed the stolen funds through the anonymization service Tornado Cash and several #Ethereum addresses to avoid being tracked by law enforcement.
The second lawsuit concerns approximately $970,000 in #bitcoin avalanche (BTC. b) stolen in the 2023 Stake. com hack. Lazarus Group's attack on this popular gambling platform resulted in more than $41 million in losses, making it cryptocurrency's worst security hack in recent history.
The two lawsuits represent a concerted attempt by the U. S. government to not only recover funds from Lazarus Group's hacking operations, but also to bring down the organization's financial infrastructure, which is allegedly being used to fund illegal activities on behalf of the North Korean government.
The Deribit and Stake. com hacks, while important, are only a small part of the group's activities. Chain investigators have linked Lazarus Group to a number of other attacks, including the July 2024 hack of the WazirX exchange. More than $235 million was stolen from the platform in that incident, further cementing Lazarus Group's reputation as a global threat in the cryptocurrency sector.
Lazarus Group's cybercrime activities are not limited to direct attacks on exchanges: in a stunning report published on August 15, 2024, ZackXBT's Bloodhound revealed that North Korean developers infiltrated at least 25 cryptocurrency projects. These developers reportedly operated under false identities and hacked the codebase to loot the projects' treasure troves.
In response to Lazarus Group's ongoing cyberattacks, the U. S.
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