Hacking within the crypto industry has been a distinguished a part of the space. Certainly one of the recent significant ones, the Harmony bridge exploit, has been under investigation because it occurred. The newest update indicates that the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance and Huobi, have teamed as much as recuperate a few of the stolen funds.
The knowledge was disclosed by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) in a tweet posted on Jan. 16. CZ tweeted, “We detected Harmony One hacker fund movement. They previously tried to launder through Binance, and we froze his accounts. This time he used Huobi. We assisted Huobi’s team in freezing his accounts. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered. CeFi helping to maintain DeFi SAFU.”
Binance And Huobi Team Up To Get better Stolen Funds
Alongside a collaboration with security teams at crypto exchanges, Binance and Huobi were in a position to freeze and recuperate a considerable amount of BTC out of the stolen funds from the Harmony bridge exploit.
Based on CZ, the hackers tried laundering the exploited funds through the Huobi exchange. After Binance discovered this, they reached out and assisted Huobi in freezing and recovering the digital assets deposited by the hackers.
Zhao added that they were in a position to recuperate roughly 124 BTC, which is value over $2 million, on the time of writing. Prior to CZ disclosure, Crypto Sleuth, ZachXBT, reported that the hacker behind the Harmony Bridge exploit was moving around funds of 41,000 Ethereum (ETH), value around $64 million within the last weekend.
The hacker also consolidated the funds after moving them around after which deposited them into three distinct cryptocurrency exchanges which ZachXBT didn’t disclose.
Summary On The Harmony Bridge Exploit
In June 2022, Harmony disclosed that its Horizon Bridge to the Harmony layer-1 blockchain had been hacked. Based on the team’s explanation via Twitter, the theft resulted in a complete of $100 million siphoned off the network in Ethereum.
Following the exploit, Harmony notified various exchanges to shut down the Horizon bridge in order that users won’t have the opportunity to perform transactions on the bridge and the attacker won’t have the opportunity to proceed the exploit.
The protocol assured the general public then that the team was working with authorities to discover those behind the theft, which included working with the FBI and various cybersecurity firms.
Overall, reports have it that an infamous North Korean hacking organization called ‘Lazarus Group’ is suspected to be behind the Harmony bridge hack as Blockchain evaluation firm Elliptic once noted that how the hack was conducted was much like other Lazarus Group attacks.
Meanwhile, the worldwide cryptocurrency market is currently in a bull run because the market capitalization exceeded $1 trillion after months of hovering below the said amount. Harmony’s token ONE has also followed suit within the bullish trend up by 4.3% within the last 24 hours with a trading volume of $51.8 million.
Featured image from DoughRoller.net, chart from TradingView.com