The US Treasury Department said a North Korean hacker gang was behind the theft of $625 million worth of cryptocurrency in March.
The hacker gang in question is the Lazarus Group, which is accused of stealing $600 million worth of cryptocurrency from Ronin's network, namely the blockchain game company Sky Mavis.
Sky Mavis, through Ronin, is the blockchain behind the popular NFT game called Axie Infinity. The blockchain network was created to avoid overcrowding on the Ethereum network.
Last March, USD 625 million worth of cryptocurrency was stolen from Ronin. The hacker attack focused on the bridge to the Ronin blockchain, which mediates between Axie Infinity and other cryptocurrency blockchains such as Ethereum.
Users can save Ethereum or USDC to Ronin, which can then be used to buy NFT items or in-game currency, and vice versa.
The link between this hack and Lazarus was seen when the US Treasury updated the sanctions list for the Lazarus Group. In the list there is now a cryptocurrency address that was used to steal from the Ronin network.
Sky Mavis also claimed to be aware of the new list from the US Ministry of Finance, as quoted by us from Zdnet, Monday (18/4/2022).
"We are still processing additional security measures before being installed on the Ronin Bridge to mitigate future security threats. It is estimated that this bridge will be back in operation by the end of the month," explained Sky Mavis in a statement.
The USD 625 million stolen by Lazarus is huge, in comparison, according to Chainalysis in 2021 the value of the crypto currency stolen by the North Korean hacker was worth less than USD 400 million.
Lazarus himself was not a hacker yesterday afternoon, because they have been around in cyberspace for a long time. One of his hacking actions that made a scene was his deletion of data from Sony Pictures Entertainment's computer network in 2014.