NORTH Korean cyber criminals are feared to have carried out the “worst hack in history” after a $1.19billion crypto heist was uncovered.
Hackers were able to gain control of an Ethereum wallet and rip all of its contents in a shock theft.
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The Dubai-based Bybit exchange confirmed the record-breaking crypto theft.
Fraudsters were able to access the £1billion wallet and transfer the contents to an unidentified address.
Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence have now accused North Korea’s Lazarus Group of being behind the hack.
The firm posted on social media that one of their trusted online sleuths gave them “definitive proof” that the attackers were from the infamous North Korean hacker group.
Despite Arkham’s claims, the perpetrators are yet to be confirmed.
The CEO of Bybit, Ben Zhou, shared a statement on X after the costly incident.
He said: “Bybit is solvent even if this hack loss is not recovered, all of clients assets are 1 to 1 backed, we can cover the loss.”
The CEO described this crime as “the worst hack in history“.
Zhou said his company received more than 350,000 withdrawal requests following the strike.
He said: “ALL withdraws have been processed.”
Bybit added that it had reported the crime to the police and said it was working “quickly and extensively” to find the criminals.
The company added: “We have fortunately worked quickly and extensively with on-chain analytics providers to identify and demix the implicated addresses.”
Bybit, founded in 2018, holds a staggering £15billion in assets and offers users various cryptocurrencies.
This £1billion attack caused the value of Ethereum to drop by about four per cent on Friday.
North Korea stole an estimated $800 million in crypto back in 2024, according to Redbord.
In 2022, it stole an estimated $1.7 billion in crypto, according to threat intelligence platform Recorded Future.
Other major cryptocurrency attacks in the past have seen hundreds of millions of pounds taken from people’s online wallets.
A whopping £32million worth of Bitcoin was stolen from a Binance exchange in 2019.
The platform said hackers ran off with over 7,000 bitcoin and carried out a “large scale security breach”.
Thief’s also stole £210million in crypto from the exchange site Mt Gox, in 2014.
The digital money was stolen because of a loophole in the website’s security.
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