A Joint Effort by the U.S. Government and Blockchain Firm Chainalysis Nearly $30 million recovered in stolen cryptocurrenciesThe effort indicates that cryptocurrencies may come under greater scrutiny and coordinated investigations between government and private institutions. Advances in blockchain analytics are key to improving security in a field where his $1.3 billion was hacked by bad actors in 2022 alone.
According to Chainalysis, $30 million has been recovered from Lazarus, a prominent hacking group believed to operate with the permission of the North Korean government (the U.S. states that the group operates under the North Korean Reconnaissance General Directorate). specifically stating that they are active). The recovered funds were part of $625 million siphoned from the popular NFT game Axie Infinity, whose Ronin sidechain was hacked earlier this year. The $30 million recovered is only 12% of the stolen crypto assets.
Senior Director of Research at Chainalysis, Erin Plante said the seizures show that it is “increasingly difficult for bad actors to successfully cash out ill-gotten crypto assets.” Stop even the most sophisticated hackers and launderers. ”
In the process, Chainalysis allowed investigators to read the blockchain and track the money with several obfuscation techniques. According to the company, Lazarus’ money laundering scheme used him over 12,000 unique crypto addresses across multiple crypto assets.Recent Licensed Tornado Cash App (As a result, one of the lead programmers, Alexey Pertsev, was detained.) were also used, as well as several cryptocurrency bridges that further helped obfuscate the stolen funds in multiple cryptocurrencies.
Of course, partial recovery is less than ideal. But even so, increasing government and law enforcement seizures of cryptocurrencies and NFTs show that even decentralized technology is subject to centralized choke points. increase. This is where checks and balances can come into effect.
Axis Infinity and Ronin sidechain developer Sky Mavis took to Twitter to announce the seizure, hoping that the stolen funds would be returned to the Treasury “after some time.”Company Recently partnered with Google Cloud As a validator node for the Ronin sidechain, Google has become Ronin’s independent enterprise validator in the node pool. The company is responsible for monitoring validator uptime and contributes to the security of the entire network. This is an interesting take. Sky Mavis uses Google’s cybersecurity expertise to add a (hopefully) incorruptible node to its relatively limited pool of validators. This was the main reason the first attack took place.
Important update regarding the Ronin incident. USD 30 million in crypto recovered. The current total of stolen funds is approximately 250 million. So that’s about 12% of the total. It will be some time before these funds are returned to the Treasury. https://t.co/Q7cLUsgYskSeptember 8, 2022
