According to investigations conducted by the Elliptic Group, crypto assets stolen from Atomic Wallet users were transferred to a crypto mixer. The North Korean group Lazarus is implicated.
Tracing funds stolen from Atomic Wallet users
On June 3, the decentralized exchange Atomic Wallet was the target of a cyberattack that allowed the hacker to steal nearly $35 million in crypto assets belonging to users of the platform.
On June 5, blockchain analytics agency Elliptic posted a tweet claiming that its team’s investigations have traced the destination of funds stolen from Atomic Wallet.
According to Elliptic, the hijacked assets on the exchange were sent to Sinbad.io, a crypto mixer known to be used by North Korean hacker group Lazarus.
This is not a first for this mixer, which has already been implicated in previous cases of money laundering. The Lazarus hacker group has used it regularly to cover the trail of the $100 million worth of crypto they have stolen from various platforms.
Separately, the analytics firm did not provide details on how much the crypto mixer received. However, she indicated that the funds were converted into bitcoins before being routed to other wallets.
Atomic Wallet is trying to recover the stolen funds
According to Atomic Wallet, the losses recorded during the hack affected less than 1¨% of the platform’s regular users.
Nevertheless, the exchange’s marketing manager, Roland Säde revealed that his team is “currently working to recover these funds”. He also added that he is waiting for the investigation to be completed to create a concrete recovery plan.
” Of course, the team is devastated, because we are very proud of our security protocol. We are working around the clock to solve this problem and come out of this crisis stronger than before.”did he declare.
In order to optimize the chances of recovering stolen funds, Richard Säde advises victims to track down fraudulent transfers and report them to the most popular crypto exchanges, which “could prevent scammers from exchanging their funds”.
” Of course, we also report them directly, but the more eyes there are on the hackers, the more difficult it is for them to move the funds”he specified.
A strategy that seems to work! Because according to some tweeters, Atomic Wallet was able to recover part of the funds in question, even though sending the assets to a crypto mixer could considerably complicate the monitoring of transactions!
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