FBI has placed a large cryptocurrency theft targeting Axie Infinity players on North Korea. They announced on Thursday that hackers linked to the country including the Lazarus Group were behind the attack.
“Our investigation revealed that the $620 million theft in Ethereum, reported March 29, was committed by APT38 and Lazarus Group.,” the agency declared in a statement released on Thursday. However, it did not provide any explanation as to how it came to that conclusion.
Sixty-two million dollars in Axie Infinity cryptocurrency was stolen by the thieves. This token is based on Ethereum and gained through the game Axie Infinity. They were able to steal the funds through Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network, which lets users transfer their crypto in and out of the game.
Ronin Network reports that the hackers made bogus withdrawals by using their private keys. The same attack was employed against Poly Network’s blockchain platform last year. In that case, the hacker took $600,000,000 in tokens. But the attacker quickly returned the money, and was then offered a job as a security consultant by the platform.
A crypto wallet connected to Axie Infinity hack was sanctioned and added to US Treasury Department’s list of Lazarus Group-related sanctions. It is thought that the hacking group was responsible for the Sony Pictures hack and WannaCry ransomware infection in 2017.
The Pentagon claimed in a 2020 report that North Korea’s cyber warfare corps includes 6,000 hackers who operate out of Belarus, China, India, Malaysia, and Russia. Pyongyang denies the allegations, as well as other hacking claims.
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Axie Infinity’s owner promised last month to reimburse players who lost their crypto.
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