"The Biggest Crypto Heist of All Time" - Crypto Platform Bybit Closes $1.5 Billion Gap
Dubai-based crypto platform Bybit announced it has closed a $1.5 billion (1.4 billion euros) gap in funds stolen by hackers earlier this week, in what a research firm called the "largest crypto heist of all time."
The platform said in X that an attacker gained control of the exchange’s Ethereum wallet on February 21 while they were making a routine transfer from an offline “cold” wallet to an online “hot” one. Ethereum is a popular type of cryptocurrency. The funds were then transferred to an unknown address.
The company said it shut down systems, secured funds and worked with cybersecurity experts as soon as its team discovered the hack. It also offered a 10 percent reward to security experts who helped recover the funds, which could be as much as $140 million (134 million euros).
The response was swift: crypto platforms and brokers froze over $42.89 million (€41 million) in suspicious transactions to help Bybit recover those funds. Crypto insight app Lookonchain said Bybit received approximately $446,870 in Ethereum (€1.17 billion) through loans, whale deposits, and coin purchases after the attack.
Three days later, an independent audit found that Bybit had closed the Ethereum asset gap in just under 72 hours with the support of other crypto trading platforms and brokers. The company said the “unprecedented show of solidarity” had improved its resilience and “laid the foundation for stronger industry-wide measures to counter and prevent future hacking incidents.”
North Korean group may be responsible, reports say
Blockchain research firm Elliptic wrote in a report on February 23 that the hack was more than double the size of the last major hack, in which $611 million (€587 million) was stolen from Poly Network in 2021. The report added that most of those funds were later returned by the hacker who stole them. Elliptic, which is working with Bybit to recover the stolen money, pointed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group as a possible perpetrator of the attack.
The group's cleanup process begins by exchanging each stolen token for a blockchain asset like Ether, which Elliptic says "occurred within minutes of the Bybit heist," as "hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen tokens ... were exchanged for Ether." Lazarus then hides the stolen funds through "layering," which makes transactions harder to track, such as by sending the stolen money to a large number of crypto wallets.
Elliptic says Lazarus is "currently engaged in this second phase" after the stolen funds were sent to "fifty different wallets" and 14.5 percent of the stolen assets, worth $195 million (€187 million), were systematically emptied from these wallets as of February 24. The Bybit theft is the latest in a series of thefts in the crypto industry, which amounts to more than $2 billion (€1.9 billion) in losses by 2024, according to Reuters.
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