FBI Points to North Korea in Bybit Crypto Hack, Urges Transaction Blocking
The FBI has attributed the recent theft of $1.5 billion from Bybit to a North Korean cryptocurrency hack and has advised industry players to blacklist wallet addresses associated with the threat actors.
Referred to as ‘TraderTraitor’, the malicious actor was singled out by the agency, which called for collaborative efforts to combat this entity.
Private sector entities, including RPC node operators, exchanges, bridges, blockchain analytics firms, DeFi services, and other virtual asset service providers, are urged by the FBI to block transactions linked to or originating from addresses being used by TraderTraitor to launder the stolen funds.
Bybit’s Secure Wallet Compromised
Interestingly, the FBI’s announcement closely followed Bybit’s initial report connecting the breach to a compromise within the Secure wallet system.
Acknowledging that the Lazarus group infiltrated one of its developers’ devices, the Gnosis Safe team confirmed,
Despite the attack on a developer’s machine, the smart contracts of the Safe system remained unaffected. The compromised account belonged to Bybit.
However, criticism was directed at Safe’s vague statement by Binance founder CZ, who questioned,
Was the $1.4 billion the largest amount managed through Safe? Why weren’t other accounts targeted?
In response, Gnosis Safe’s founder, Martin Koeppelmann, explained,
Our investigation has identified it as one of the largest Safes to be impacted. We are currently focusing on monitoring all post-hack transactions carried out through Safe until the interface was disabled.
Following the breach, Bybit suffered losses of 401,000 ETH; however, the market remained relatively stable, likely due to the prompt and transparent actions taken by the exchange.
By the beginning of the week, Bybit’s ETH reserves had been replenished, and all borrowed funds from other exchanges that were utilized to meet withdrawal requests over the weekend had been repaid.
Despite the hack, ETH spiked to $2,800 and only experienced a slight drop to $2,200 in response to inflation concerns stemming from President Trump’s proposed tariff revisions.