By James Davis
On Friday, Atomic Wallet released a report regarding the hack that happened earlier this month. The report shows only 0.1% of the wallet’s five million users lost funds through the hack.
The team behind Atomic Wallet said it had identified the cause of the attack and was working to recover the lost money. It has collaborated with top crypto exchanges, including Binance and Coinbase, in an effort to freeze questionable deposits. In addition, the team has contracted blockchain analysis companies Crystal and Chainalysis to help monitor the movements of the stolen funds.
Atomic Wallet’s spokesperson reported that some trading platforms had already blocked stolen funds, although they did not disclose specific figures.
Also, the report does not mention how much attackers made away with on June 3. However, blockchain security company Elliptic revealed on June 4 that hackers stole over $100 million, $65 million more than the figure initially reported by blockchain observer ZachXBT. Moreover, Elliptic’s report last week noted that various crypto exchanges had so far frozen a combined $1 million in stolen crypto.
What Caused the Attack?
The Atomic Wallet developers have highlighted four possible causes of the attack. They include an infrastructure breach, a virus targeting local user devices, a “man-in-the-middle attack,” and malware injection into the code.
While Friday’s report failed to reveal the hacker’s identity, blockchain security company MistTrack has connected North Korean hacking organization Lazarus to the attack. Further, the Atomic Wallet spokesperson said several investigation agencies also claim that the notorious criminal group masterminded the hack.
Hackers Convert Stolen Crypto to Bitcoin
Meanwhile, MistTrack says it caught the Lazarus Group converting the illegally obtained money to Bitcoin two days after the attack. The criminals then transferred the BTC to coin mixer Blender.io to launder it. On June 20, the security firm published a follow-up report, claiming that the Lazarus Group had converted more tokens to Bitcoin and used Russia-based crypto exchange Garantex to cash in the crypto.
MistTrack also disclosed that the hackers were using numerous techniques to dodge exchanges’ attempts to seize the stolen tokens.