Binance and Huobi, the renowned cryptocurrency exchanges, have again gone ahead and frozen multiple accounts that have been linked to the Harmony Horizon bridge hack that took place the previous June. It has been recorded that close to $1.4 million worth of crypto that has been frozen came from accounts that have a link to Lazarus Group which operates out of North Korea.
The investigation into the Harmony hack was carried out by Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, according to a report that had been shared on the 14th of February. Interestingly, the firm didn’t describe what tokens or coins had been frozen.
Binance and Huobi Have Come Together To Deal With Crypto Hack
Elliptic, the company behind the investigation, mentioned that the intelligence had been passed to Binance and Huobi, after which the cryptocurrency exchanges promptly froze the accounts that were linked to Lazarus Group. Since the exploitation of Harmony, it had been well-documented that the hacking group had resorted to Tornado Cash- an OFAC-sanctioned privacy mixer- in their attempt to break the trail that would take investigators to the original crime. Although it did make it easy to cash out the funds at an exchange, the investigators managed to trace the entire sum of the stolen funds that had been sent through the mixer in the case- as stated by the report.
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation credited the Lazarus Group with the Harmony bridge attack on the 24th of January. Interestingly, this hasn’t been the first time when Huobi and Binance have come together to deal with this matter. On the 16th of January, the two crypto platforms went ahead and froze the accounts- while recovering 121 Bitcoin tokens, worth $2.5 million at the time. Unfortunately, the recovery was just a fraction of the $63.5 million that had been laundered over the weekend, according to ZachXBT.
