Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance he took it to Twitter and talked about an attempted exploitation of funds. He mentioned how the attempt was reported by the exchange’s security team. However, the movement of funds was being carried out by the hacker Harmony One. Zhao also mentioned that the hacker was attempting to launder funds through Binance. All efforts were in vain, as the account was soon frozen. The hacker did not let anything stop him from carrying out his malicious acts and changed exchanges. When the switch to Huobi was discovered, Binance extended a hand to Huobi to prevent the laundering of funds.
We detected Harmony One hacker fund movement. They previously tried to launder through Binance and we froze his accounts from him. This time I used Huobi. We assisted Huobi team to freeze his accounts from him. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered. CeFi helping to keep DeFi #SAFU! 🙏
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) January 16, 2023
Both companies took continuous action to prevent the hacker from laundering the stolen funds. With the help of Binance, Huobi was also able to stop the accounts involved. Also, thanks to his joint effort, it was possible to recover almost 124 BTC. Once the matter was resolved, Zhao assured that a company from CeFi successfully assisted another from DeFi in maintaining its security.
It is claimed that the hackers responsible for the exploit are Lazarus from North Korea. The group was responsible for moving close to 41k ETH from the Harmony One Bridge hack over the weekend. These stolen funds were later transferred in batches of 100 ETH from Tornado Cash to Railgun. Similarly, these same funds were consolidated and stored on three different unnamed exchanges as well.
BINANCE INTERVENES AGAIN
As soon as the matter was resolved, Huobi Global adviser Justin Sun expressed his gratitude. He made it clear that Binance’s timely identification and intervention prevented the hacker from laundering the funds. Considering the incident, it was mentioned that Huobi would continuously keep an eye on any suspicious activity. When identified, these issues will be dealt with instantly to provide maximum security for users.
On June 24 of last year, Harmony teams identified an exploit. At that time, funds of about USD 100 million were compromised. A few days later, the Lazarus group was deemed the mastermind behind the exploit. The identification was possible when the shape of the attack was compared to some of the group’s previous attacks.
