Evening
So the echo of Axie Infinity's Ronin Bridge hack last month, still continue to resonate the crypto world. Last week United States Department of the Treasury has linked the Axie Infinity's Ronin Bridge hack to the North Korean State sponsored group of hackers Lazarus.
Following the attack last, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) added exploiter's Ethereum wallet address, labeled as "Ronin Bridge Exploiter" by , to its sanction list. And today three more wallet addresses linked with hacker have been added to the OFAC sanction list.
Three wallet addresses were added to the sanction list after significant sums were deposited into them from the wallet linked with Ronin Bridge hack. One the addresses already started funneling funds via coin mixing tool Tornado Cash.
Tornado Cash is a decentralized Ethereum based protocol allowing users to carryout transactions privately. Simply speaking all deposits go into the Tornado Cash protocol, mixed and withdrawn to their new destination addresses, thus breaking the link between depositor and destination addresses. Tornado Cash's privacy services are ideal for entities looking transaction privacy/anonymity.
To avoid regulatory/compliance issues, Tornado Cash uses Etherscan to prevent blacklisted addresses accessing their services. So new addresses added to the sanction list will now not be able to use Tornado Cash as they will be filtered out by Etherscan.
All this addresses blacklisting may seem preemptive, but chances of recovery of stolen funds still remain slim. The hacker can always use new wallet addresses to launder funds before getting flagged by OFAC.
