Lazarus Group, was seen sending Bitcoin to multiple unknown addresses, bringing their total holdings down to 13,441 BTC.
Arkham Intelligence reports that the North Korean hacker group’s Bitcoin holdings have reached a value of around $1.15 billion as a result of recent large-scale transfers which have occurred.
An unnamed wallet received a transfer of 12.929 Bitcoins (BTC) on March 20 at approximately 9:18 AM UTC. This transaction was worth $1.12 million. Following the completion of this original transaction, additional transfers were accomplished to four more wallets.
Two of these wallets received 0.308 BTC apiece, one wallet received about 14.849 BTC, and the other wallet received 15.684 BTC. Within the span of three hours, a total of over 44.07 BTC, which is equivalent to $3.76 million, was transferred to five distinct wallet addresses.
It would appear that the Lazarus Group is distributing its Bitcoin holdings among a number of different wallets, most likely as a plan for money laundering in order to make the assets more difficult to track down. Bybit CEO Ben Zhou indicated earlier today that 88.87% of the assets that were taken from the exchange may still be traced back to their original source through the use of on-chain data.
According to Zhou, about 86.29 percent of the stolen funds, which are equivalent to $1.23 billion, have been converted into 12,836 Bitcoins and divided among 9,117 wallets. In addition to this, he suggested that the hackers are use Bitcoin mixers in order to conceal the transaction history, which would render the monitoring attempts even more difficult.
Lazarus Group is the name of the wallet that Arkham Intelligence has identified as holding 13,658 ETH, which is approximately worth $27 million, $3.17 million in BNB, 400 DAI, and $288,870 in BABYDOGE as of this moment.
Stablecoins such as BUSD, USDT, and USDC make up the remaining half of its holdings, with Bitcoin constituting the sizeable amount of its total holdings. There is evidence that the Lazarus Group, a hacker outfit that is supported by the North Korean government, has been operating since at least 2009.
Its first known attack, which was referred to as “Operation Troy,” was directed at the government of South Korea. The group’s most recent major operation was a hack on the Bybit cryptocurrency exchange, which resulted in losses of around $1.4 billion. This hack is considered to be one of the largest cryptocurrency heists in history.
