North Korea feared to be behind $2 billion Bybit hack, the biggest crypto heist in history
North Korean cyber criminals are feared to have carried out the “worst hack in history” after a $2 billion crypto heist was uncovered.
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North Korean cyber criminals are feared to have carried out the “worst hack in history” after a $US1.19 billion ($2.36 billion) billion crypto heist was uncovered.
Hackers were able to gain control of an ethereum wallet and rip all of its contents in a shock theft.
The Dubai-based Bybit exchange confirmed the record-breaking crypto theft.
Fraudsters were able to access the wallet and transfer the contents to an unidentified address.
Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence has now accused North Korea’s Lazarus Group of being behind the hack.
The firm posted on social media that one of its trusted online sleuths gave them “definitive proof” that the attackers were from the infamous North Korean hacker group.
Despite Arkham’s claims, the perpetrators are yet to be confirmed.
The chief executive of Bybit, Ben Zhou, shared a statement on X after the costly incident.
“Bybit is solvent even if this hack loss is not recovered, all of clients assets are 1 to 1 backed, we can cover the loss,” he said.
The CEO described this crime as “the worst hack in history”.
Mr Zhou said his company received more than 350,000 withdrawal requests following the strike.
“ALL withdraws have been processed,” he said.
Bybit added that it had reported the crime to the police and said it was working “quickly and extensively” to find the criminals.
The company added, “We have fortunately worked quickly and extensively with on-chain analytics providers to identify and demix the implicated addresses.”
Bybit, founded in 2018, holds a staggering $29 billion in assets and offers users various cryptocurrencies.
This $2.36 billion attack caused the value of ethereum to drop by about 4 per cent on Friday.
North Korea stole an estimated $1.2 billion in crypto last year, according to Redbord.
In 2022, it stole an estimated $2.68 billion in crypto, according to threat intelligence platform Recorded Future.
Other major cryptocurrency attacks in the past have seen hundreds of millions of dollars taken from people’s online wallets.
A whopping $63 million worth of bitcoin was stolen from the Binance exchange in 2019.
The platform said hackers ran off with over 7000 bitcoin and carried out a “large scale security breach”.
Thieves also stole $415 million in crypto from the exchange site Mt Gox, in 2014. The digital money was stolen because of a loophole in the website’s security.
This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission
Originally published as North Korea feared to be behind $2 billion Bybit hack, the biggest crypto heist in history
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