Lazarus steals $41M from virtual betting site
North Korean threat group Lazarus bilked online gambling platform Stake.com out of a cool $41 million in cryptocurrencies including Ethereum, the FBI says.
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North Korean threat group Lazarus bilked online gambling platform Stake.com out of a cool $41 million in cryptocurrencies including Ethereum, the FBI has disclosed.
The US federal law enforcement bureau made the statement on September 6th after confirming that the cyber-theft had taken place two days previously.
“The FBI investigation has revealed that DPRK [North Korean] cyber actors moved stolen funds associated with the Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and Polygon networks from Stake.com into virtual currency addresses,” said the FBI.
The Bureau says this is not the first crypto-heist pulled off by Lazarus, although it stopped short of attributing cyberattacks to the gang specifically, instead focusing on its parent country North Korea.
“These same DPRK actors are also responsible for several other high-profile international virtual currency heists,” said the FBI, before claiming that this year so far “cyber actors” working for the pariah Asian state have stolen more than $200 million in virtual funds.
This amount includes $60 million from Alphapo and CoinsPaid in July and around $100 million of virtual currency from Atomic Wallet the previous month, it said.
The FBI also cites previous North Korean attacks against Harmony’s Horizon blockchain bridge and Sky Mavis’s Ronin, which lost $625 million last year in what may be the single most costly heist of its kind.
Lazarus was sanctioned in 2019 by the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets, which issued a similar raft of bans against Russian entity Trickbot this week.
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