Bybit's stolen funds tracking is difficult, more than a quarter are untraceable
According to the latest news, the North Korean Lazarus hacker group stole $1.4 billion worth of cryptocurrency from the Bybit exchange, and the whereabouts of most of the funds are now difficult to trace.
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou revealed in a tweet on X that about 27.59% of the funds are untraceable, mainly due to the hackers using cryptocurrency mixers and decentralized services to obscure the flow of funds.
Although 68.57% of the funds are still traceable, only 3.84% of the funds have been successfully frozen. The hackers primarily used Wasabi Mixer for money laundering and further dispersed funds through CryptoMixer, Tornado Cash, and Railgun.
Additionally, the attackers utilized multiple decentralized cross-chain trading platforms to transfer assets and exchanged them for fiat currency through peer-to-peer (P2P) and over-the-counter (OTC) transactions to prevent tracking.
Data shows that currently about 84.45% of the stolen assets have been converted to Bitcoin through Thorchain, with a value of approximately $960 million spread across nearly 36,000 wallets, including 342,975 ETH converted into 10,003 BTC. Despite extensive monitoring by the exchange, only a small portion of the stolen assets remains on the Ethereum blockchain.
To address these vulnerabilities, Bybit's Lazarus Bounty program has received a total of 5,443 bounty reports in the past 60 days, but only 70 of them could be verified. Zhou emphasized that more bounty hunters capable of cracking mixer transactions are needed, while the future of tracking dark coin transaction flows will depend on large-scale collaborative efforts.
Conclusion:
In the current situation, mixers have become a key link in the money laundering chain for hackers, and their anonymization features are being systematically abused by criminals.
Faced with increasingly complex cryptocurrency crime techniques, exchanges must improve cross-chain fund tracking systems to achieve real-time alerts for suspicious transactions; they must also promote the establishment of anti-money laundering standards in the industry and create a threat intelligence sharing mechanism.
However, this collaborative defense system has already become a key barrier to curbing cryptocurrency crime. Finally, do you think such cross-border hacker attacks can be effectively curtailed in the future?
