The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a statement last week, confirming that the online crypto-gambling platform Strake.com was attacked by a North Korea-based hacker organization.
As CasinoGamesPro reported a week ago, the online crypto casino became subject to a $41-million worth of digital assets hack on September 4th. The gambling firm initially described a series of transactions which occurred as a result of the hack as “unauthorized transfers”, and then warned its users that it launched an internal investigation after the attack took place.
The FBI held its own investigation and, eventually, listed addresses for multiple digital wallets that allegedly contained digital funds that were stolen as a result of the breach. The Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that the North Korean Lazarus Group was the one that funneled crypto assets from the online gambling platform across Bitcoin, Polygon, Ethereum, and Binance Smart Chain networks.
The investigators claimed that the attackers’ digital fingerprints connected the latest hacker attack by Lazarus Group to other heists that took place recently, such as a $60-million theft from projects CoinsPaid and Aplhapo in July 2023, and the stealing of $100 million from Atomic Wallet in June 2023.
Also, last April, the US Treasury Department managed to connect the hackers to a $622-million exploit that resulted in draining an Ethereum sidechain of the play-to-earn crypto game Axie Infinity, called Ronin Network. For now, it remains one of the biggest crypto exploits in history.
Lazarus Group Responsible for Series of Cryptocurrency Attacks over the Last Few Years, Reports Say
As CasinoGamesPro reported a week ago, the stolen crypto assets were moved from the online crypto casino platform’s Ethereum, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain networks to 33 different addresses. The investigation carried out by the FBI unveiled that hackers originating from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have stolen digital currencies worth more than $200 million so far in 2023, including funds siphoned off CoinsPaid and Alphapo crypto platforms earlier this year.
According to investigators from the Bureau and US authorities, funds stolen by North Korean criminals are used to support various weapons programs in their country.
The past several years have seen the North Korean Lazarus Group become an increasingly massive concern for crypto projects and authorities. According to the crypto analytics firm Elliptic, the hacker group has stolen digital assets amounting to more than $2 billion as of June 2023.
Reportedly, the hackers from the group have sought to cover their digital tracks to make the thefts hardly traceable, but the on-chain activity of Lazarus Group has affected the coin-mixing protocol Tornado Cash, which has been described as a privacy tool. In 2022, the service faced some sanctions by the US Treasury Department under the allegations that it had been allegedly helping launder cryptocurrency worth $7 billion.
Some restrictions that ban the use of the Tornado Cash service in the US were affirmed by the Federal Court in July, while the Justice Department even arrested Roman Storm who is one of the co-founders of the coin-mixing protocol last month. Storm faced charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, as well as sanctions violations.
