North Korean hackers have successfully cashed out $300 million from the record-breaking $1.5 billion crypto heist of ByBit Exchange.
Experts say the infamous Lazarus hacking team is working nearly 24 hours a day to launder the cash.
Within two hours of the theft, the stolen funds were sent to 50 different wallets, each holding approximately 10,000 ETH. These wallets were then emptied one by one over the next nine days.
Elliptic says North Korea is the most sophisticated and well-resourced launderer of cryptoassets in existence, continually adapting its techniques to evade identification and seizure of stolen assets.
North Korea-linked actors have stolen over $6 billion in cryptoassets since 2017, with the proceeds reportedly spent on the country’s ballistic missile program.
The ByBit hack is by the far the largest crypto heist of all time, dwarfing the $611 million stolen from Poly Network in 2021. The vast majority of these funds were eventually returned by the hacker.
Elliptic says the incident is almost certainly the single largest known theft of any kind in all time, a record previously held by Saddam Hussein, who stole $1 billion from the Iraqi Central Bank on the eve of the 2003 Iraq War.