Oh, dear! It seems like the crypto world is about to get a whole lot colder for OTC services. According to Bitrace, a joint crypto tracing and analysis platform, we might be facing a massive freeze wave targeting OTC groups and crypto payment companies. And guess what? It’s all thanks to the Bybit hack, which resulted in a whopping loss of over $1.5 billion. Ouch!
The Lazarus Group, a notorious North Korean hacker group, is believed to be behind this heist. But don’t worry, they’ve got form – they’ve previously attacked Japanese cryptocurrency exchange DMM and Poloniex. So, they’re practically old hands at this sort of thing.
Bitrace has dubbed the Bybit hack the “largest single theft in the history of cryptocurrency,” surpassing previous hacks in losses, such as Poly Network’s hack of $611 million in 2021 and Ronin Network’s loss of $620 million in an exploit in 2022. Talk about a record-breaker!
Throughout their investigations, Bitrace found that hackers have a tendency to not only use unlicensed platforms and mixers to launder their stolen funds. Hackers also utilize centralized platforms and OTC merchants to process the funds. As a result, a large number of user accounts on major exchanges ended up intentionally or unintentionally receiving the stolen funds. These accounts were subject to risk control, leading to business addresses of OTC merchants and payment institutions being frozen by Tether (USDT) after major hacks.
The attack on Bybit was discovered after the exchange detected unauthorized transfers from an Ethereum (ETH) cold wallet. Bybit then launched an investigation into the transfers, partnering with blockchain forensics experts to trace the stolen assets.
But wait, there’s more! Bybit CEO Ben Zhou claimed that the exchange has successfully recovered the loss suffered from the hack within two days. He also told traders that an audited plan-of-record report will be published soon to show that the exchange has “fully closed the ETH gap.” Phew!
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2025-02-24 12:46