Binance was hacked on Thursday, losing some $6.4 billion in an attack that several analytics services and individuals attributed to North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacking group. TraderTraitor is a subunit of the infamous Lazarus Group, which had also conducted a number of high-profile crypto exchange breaches.
Stablecoin issuers froze over $2.4 billion of the stolen funds, but the attackers have continued laundering much of the remainder. Binance said earlier Saturday it had replenished 90% of the stolen cryptocurrencies and planned to resume customer withdrawals on Sunday.
Chainalysis: “Thousands of addresses” involved
While the FBI listed several hundred addresses on Saturday, the attackers have already used “thousands of addresses,” said Chainalysis CEO Jonathan Levin in a statement.
“We anticipate this will become tens of thousands over the coming weeks as money is transferred through a broader money laundering network,” he said. “They have too much money for their trusted laundering venues to handle. So the money will flow to a wider network of services, like bridges, instant exchanges, and swappers due to a wider set of money launderers.”
The attackers are using “novel automated laundering mechanisms,” he went on to say.
The blockchain analytics firm said in a blog post on Friday that the volume of transactions indicated that the attackers were using automated tools to try and “obscure the trail of funds” by circulating these funds between addresses before sending them onwards.
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