Lazarus Group, an infamous hacking group of an unknown number of cyber criminals allegedly run by the government of North Korea, currently holds more than $47 million worth of crypto assets in their wallets. The blockchain analytics provider Dune Analytics, which gathers on-chain crypto data and makes it accessible to the blockchain community, revealed that stolen assets include Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, and Binance USD, among other stablecoins.
Still, the current amount of stolen funds has dropped by $39 million compared to the $86 million the Lazarus-linked wallets held on September 6. The figure was noticed a few days after the online gambling platform Stake became a victim of the group and lost $55 million in the incident.
According to the current data provided by Dune Analytics, the hackers’ wallets hold $42.5 million in BTC, $1.1 million in BNB, $1.9 million in Ethereum, and $640,000 in BUSD.
Interestingly, the cybercriminals do not hold any privacy coins like Monero and Zcash in their stash, which are more difficult to track on the blockchain than other crypto coins.
Digital wallets the US Federal Bureau Investigations (FBI) identified as owned by a North Korean hacking group were being tracked on the dashboard of the Dune analytics. Surprisingly, these wallets have been active since the most recent transaction was executed on September 20.
The parent company of Dune Analytics, 21.co stated that this amount is much lower than the actual amount cybercriminals hold.
The company noted;
We should note that this is a lower-bound estimation of Lazarus Group’s crypto holdings based on publicly available information.
Lazarus Group Continues Targeting Crypto Platforms
Hong Kong-based crypto exchange CoinEx is one of the latest victims of the hacking group. On-chain sleuths, SlowMist, and ZachXBT had found the links to the Lazarus group being behind the exploit and estimated that the firm had lost $55.5 million to the incident.
Three days after CoinEx faced an exploit, the hackers targeted another centralized exchange, Remitano, on September 14. The attack saw a breach in the exchange’s hot wallet and the group transferred nearly $2.7 million to an unknown wallet address without any transaction history.
In 2023 so far, these hackers have stolen over $200 million from security breaches at various crypto firms and service providers. CoinsPaid, Atomic Wallet, Alphapho, and many others became the victims of these attacks in this time span.
Chainalysis, a blockchain security firm, uncovered that these numbers are far less than the cyber attacks the group performed in 2022. The hacker group stole an enormous $1.6 billion last year, representing a decrease of 80% this year.
Featured image from Pixabay and chart from Trading View.com.