Binance recovers $5.8M from the $600 million mega hack orchestrated by a North Korean hacking group. The stolen crypto was transferred to Binance, and as the crypto exchange recognized it, they recovered it. Binance’s vigilance and recovery of the stolen funds show that it isn’t easy to cash out stolen cryptocurrencies. Authorities that always blame crypto for being the main cause of money laundering and criminal activities could also re-consider their take.
The $600 million mega hack
Two weeks back, on 14th April, the US treasury department found that the $600 million hack from the Ronin software bridge was led by a hacking group from North Korea. After this, the Ethereum addresses tied to the group were added to the sanction list. This made it possible for Binance to track the funds that were transferred to a mixer protocol, tornado cash. As soon as they identified it, the funds were frozen. Almost 86 different accounts were involved in the money laundering through Binance, said the company’s CEO.
Till now, nearly $230 million of the stolen funds have moved from the wallet. Of this, nearly $170 million was moved out and sent to new addresses, which in turn sent to tornado cash to hide the trails of the funds. It is still not going to be easy for the perpetrators to erase their footprint entirely.
Many blockchain firms like Chainalysis are really good at unmixing the track of funds that hackers use. So, a link between the sender and receiver can be established. Tornado cash is also taking steps to block sanctioned wallets which will make it even more difficult for the hackers.
What is a cryptocurrency mixer?
A cryptocurrency mixer is a service that combines potentially traceable or “tainted” funds with others in order to disguise the path back to the fund’s original source. This is often accomplished by collecting source money from numerous inputs over a long and random period of time and then spitting them out to destination addresses. So, it becomes challenging to trace precise coins since all money is pooled together and then given at random intervals.
What are your thoughts as Binance recovers $5.8M from the $600 million mega hack? And do you think that this shows that it’s not easy to cash out stolen crypto? Let us know in the comments below. Also, if you found our content informative, do like and share it with your friends.
Also Read: Internal crypto documents of EU leaked: Policymakers prefer ETH over BTC.
