North Korean hackers have successfully cashed out $300 million from the record-breaking $1.5 billion crypto heist of ByBit Exchange.
Experts indicate that the notorious Lazarus hacking team is operating nearly around the clock to launder the stolen funds. Within two hours of the heist, the stolen assets were distributed to 50 different wallets, each containing approximately 10,000 ETH. These wallets were systematically drained over the following nine days.
According to Elliptic, North Korea is the most sophisticated and well-resourced entity for laundering cryptoassets, consistently adapting its methods to evade detection and the recovery of stolen funds. Since 2017, North Korea-linked actors have stolen over $6 billion in cryptoassets, with much of the proceeds reportedly funneled into the country’s ballistic missile program.
The ByBit hack marks the largest crypto heist in history, surpassing the $611 million stolen from Poly Network in 2021, the majority of which was eventually returned by the hacker. Elliptic asserts that this incident is likely the largest known theft of any kind in history, a record previously held by Saddam Hussein, who stole $1 billion from the Iraqi Central Bank just before the 2003 Iraq War.