- Lazarus Group moved $64M ETH from the Harmony Hack.
- The crypto assets were allegedly routed via Railgun.
- Lazarus has also been linked to other crypto fraud schemes.
The North Korean cybercrime organization known as Lazarus had a very busy weekend, transferring over 41000 ETH worth approximately $63.5 million via Railgun before pooling assets and depositing them on three separate exchanges.
According to the allegations, the crypto assets were routed via Railgun after having their beginnings in the anonymizing service Tornado Cash. It is important to note that Railgun is a smart contract privacy platform that uses zero-knowledge proofs to obfuscate transactions.
The move has widely been viewed as an effort to launder the funds, according to several sources close to the matter. Railgun has allegedly been widely used by criminals due to its ability to conceal the origins of transactions and obfuscate the specifics, making it an attractive tool.
Reports indicate that Lazarus may have been able to use Railgun to split the transfers multiple times while keeping the same amount of ETH but with new addresses. This made it more difficult to track the actual origin of the money.
Additionally, Lazarus used three separate exchanges at the same time to move the money, which is another sign that the money was being used for illicit activities.
However, this is not the first time that the Lazarus hacking group has been linked to fraudulent activities. BlueNoroff, the name given by security researchers to a group linked with the North Korean state-sponsored hacking collective had expanded its criminal activities to include posing as venture capitalists looking to invest in crypto startups, according to a report revealed in December 2022 from the Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.
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