$100M Harmony hack linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, says FBI

The FBI has confirmed that the North Korean hacker groups Lazarus Group and APT38 are responsible for the theft of $100 million worth of crypto from Harmony’s Horizon bridge.

The attack took place in June 2022 and was the result of security holes in Harmony’s Ethereum bridge. The FBI stated that the North Korean hackers started shifting around $60 million worth of the stolen funds earlier this month via the Ethereum-based privacy protocol RAILGUN.

Binance also detected that the hackers were trying to launder the funds through the Huobi crypto exchange, and promptly assisted in freezing and recovering the digital assets deposited by the hackers, according to CEO Changpeng Zhao.

The FBI stated that its cyber and virtual assets units, as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Justice Department’s crypto unit, have continued “to identify and disrupt North Korea’s theft and laundering of virtual currency, which is used to support North Korea’s ballistic missile and Weapons of Mass Destruction programs.”

The Lazarus group is a well-known hacking syndicate that has reportedly had a hand in a number of key exploits in the crypto industry and has been alleged to have been behind the $600 million Ronin Bridge hack from March last year.

The United States Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control updated its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) list to include the Lazarus Group following the hack in April 2022.