Evening
So have you heard of flukes? Well, this is what happened today, as Crypto Exchange Binance recovered a small portion of funds stolen($5.8 million) from last month's Ronin Bridge mega hack, according to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao tweet today.
CZ tweeted that North Korean hacking group Lazarus which is allegedly responsible for Ronin Bridge hack, started channeling some of the stolen fund on Binance exchange via 86 different account and the exchange managed to recover $5.8 million of funds.
Last week, US Treasury department added exploiter's Ethereum wallet address to its sanction list. The sanction wallet address labelled as “Ronin Bridge Exploiter” on Etherscan allegedly belongs to North Korean state sponsored hackers group Lazarus.
Prior to current fund laundering effort the exploiter was also spotted moving $7.0 million of stolen funds using the coin mixing tool Tornado Cash to sever the link between hacker's and receiver's accounts.
On March 23, Axie Infinity's Ronin Bridge was exploited for $623 million. The hack which is believed to be the biggest in crypto history, happened as hacker gained access to 5 out of 9 Ronin Bridge validator keys, resulting in draining of 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5 million USDC stable coins from the bridge.
Sky Mavis the developer behind Ronin chain have pledged to increase number of validators from 9 to 21 in coming months to increase security of the chain. Moreover Sky Mavis have also launched a hefty bug bounty program to encourage white hat hackers to identify any vulnerability lingering in their protocol. As far as the affected parties are concerned, Sky Mavis have plans to reimburse and and have already successfully completed $150 million worth funding round for the purpose.
Sky Mavis is working with several law enforcement agencies trying to recover the stolen funds. Whereas chances of recovery are slim, flukes like today's recovery by Binance can always happen.
This also highlights the difficulty involved on hacker's part to launder stolen funds, as huge chunk of stolen funds still remains in the Ronin Bridge Exploiter wallet. May be hackers are getting desperate, as it turns out hacking may be was the easy part but moving the funds that large anonymously has been proving much more difficult.
