North Korean hackers behind the biggest crypto heist ever; internet sleuths start the hunt

After losing billions to North Korea's state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus, the crypto industry is finally ramping up its efforts to prevent them from laundering funds stolen from the Bybit exchange.

Ben Zhou, the CEO of the company and one of the co-signers of the ethereum (ETH) transaction that allowed hackers to steal more than $1 billion in ETH, invited the industry to join them in a "war against Lazarus."

The exchange launched the "industry-first bounty site," lazarusbounty.com, to track Lazarus' money laundering activities.

In the first version of the site, bounty hunters can connect their wallets and help trace the funds. Once the submitted information leads to the freezing of funds, the bounty is paid instantly upon freezing.

According to the website, the total bounty is 10% of the recovered funds: 5% goes to the entity that successfully froze the funds, while another 5% goes to contributors who helped trace them.

The website also features a leaderboard of "Bad" and "Good" actors. The former includes entities that refused to assist Bybit, with only one name listed so far – crypto exchange eXch, marked as "refused to respond." Shortly after the hack, Bybit and eXch engaged in a public dispute, accusing each other of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, six entities are listed among the "Good" actors, including crypto exchange Bitget and stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether, among others, who in some way helped freeze or trace funds.

At the time of writing, five bounty hunters have registered, and the amount of already awarded bounty exceeds $4 million, according to the website. However, it does not clarify how this sum was calculated.

Among the five registered bounty hunters, only one is an individual – ZachXBT, a popular blockchain sleuth – while the others are crypto entities such as Mantle, Zeroshadow, Binance, and Bybit itself. The largest estimated bounty is attributed to Mantle ($2 million), while the rest are under $10,000 each, making the total sum lower than the reported $4 million.

In any case, Bybit's CEO says that he has assigned a team to maintain and update the website.

"We will not stop until Lazarus or bad actors in the industry are eliminated. In the future, we will open it up to other victims of Lazarus as well," Zhou said, adding that the second version of the website is in development and will include more tools and features.