Final week, hackers stole round $1.4 billion in Ethereum cryptocurrency from crypto alternate Bybit, believed to be the most important crypto heist in historical past. Now, the corporate is providing a complete of $140 million in bounties for anybody who may help hint and freeze the stolen funds.
Bybit’s CEO and co-founder Ben Zhou announced the bounty in a put up on X on Tuesday.
On the official site of the bounty, Bybit explains that for each time somebody traces and freezes a few of the stolen funds, 5% of that quantity goes to the one who discovered them, and 5% to the “entity” that froze stated funds.
On the time of writing, thanks to 5 bounty hunters, Bybit has already awarded $4.23 million in bounties, in accordance with the positioning, whose emblem is a knife showing to be stabbing by the top of North Korean chief Kim Jong-un.
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“We is not going to cease till Lazarus or dangerous actors within the business is eradicated. Sooner or later we are going to open it as much as different victims of Lazarus as nicely,” Zhou wrote, referring to Lazarus Group, the identify that the cybersecurity business has assigned to a broad group of North Korean-backed hackers centered largely on cryptocurrency thefts.
A number of safety researchers and crypto safety and monitoring corporations consider the hackers behind the huge Bybit heist work for the North Korean authorities, which over time has change into very efficient at concentrating on crypto exchanges and web3 corporations, stealing $650 million in crypto in 2024 alone, in accordance with the governments of the US, Japan, and South Korea.
On Wednesday, Bybit’s Zhou published the preliminary results of the forensic investigation into the hack, led by two corporations, Sygnia Labs and Verichains. Sygnia concluded that the “root trigger” of the assault was malicious code coming from the infrastructure of SafeWallet, a crypto pockets platform. Verichains stated a benign Javascript file was changed with a malicious model “particularly concentrating on Ethereum Multisig Chilly Pockets of Bybit.”
The 2 investigating safety corporations concluded that hackers breached a developer’s system at SafeWallet, as the company itself confirmed.