Ben Zhou, General Director of Bybit, during the token2049 conference in Singapore, on Thursday, September 14, 2023.
Joseph Nair Bloomberg Getty images
Bybit, the main cryptocurrency exchange, was hacked in the amount of $ 1.5 billion in digital assets, including what is estimated as the largest cryptographic robbery in history.
The attack has violated the cold portfolio of Bybit, an offline storage system designed for security. Stolen funds, above all etherThey were quickly moved to many wallets and liquidated through various platforms.
“Ensure that all other cold wallets are safe”, ben Zhou, CEO Bybit, published on X. “All payments are normal.”
Blockchain analysis companies, including elliptical intelligence and Arkham, traced the stolen crypto because it was transferred to various accounts and was quickly unloaded. Hack significantly exceeds previous thefts in the sector, According to the elliptic. This includes $ 611 million stolen from Poly Network in 2021 and $ 570 million exhausted from Binance in 2022.
Elliptic analysts later combined an attack from North Korea, Lazarus Group, sponsored by the state of collective notorious hacking from the knockout of billions of dollars from the cryptocurrency industry. The group is known for the use of locks in security to finance the North Korean regime, often using sophisticated washing methods to cover the flow of funds.
“We marked the addresses of the thief in our software to prevent the payment of these funds through all other exchanges,” Tom Robinson, the main scientist of Elliptic, said in the e-mail.
The violation immediately caused rush to withdraw from Bybita when users were afraid of potential insolvency. Zhou said the outflows stabilized. To calm customers, he announced that Bybit secured a loan to the bridge from undisclosed partners to cover all unspecified losses and maintain surgery.
The history of the Lazarus group concerns cryptocurrency platforms dates from 2017, when the group infiltrated four South Korean stock exchanges and stole Bitcoin worth $ 200 million. Since law enforcement and cryptocurrency tracking bodies are working on tracking stolen assets, industry experts warn that large -scale thefts remain a basic risk.
“The harder it is to take advantage of such crimes, the less often they will take place,” Robinson from Elliptic he wrote in the post.
TO WATCH: Cryptographic supplies are falling
