“We are monitoring more than 5,500 cryptocurrency wallets that we believe were compromised as a result of the attack,” the company’s experts said.
Meanwhile, representatives of Atomic Wallet still have not given any explanation regarding the main reason for the hack. In a tweet dated June 3, the developers only acknowledged the veracity of reports of hacked wallets and added that “less than 1% of users” were affected.
Elliptic attributes the incident to the North Korean Lazarus Group, which is believed to have stolen more than $2 billion worth of crypto assets in multiple attacks over several years. The Atomic Wallet attack was the first major cryptocurrency theft publicly attributed to Lazarus since the $100 million Horizon Bridge hack in June 2022.
Since the theft, Elliptic has been working to recover the stolen assets. Analysts have already helped freeze more than $1 million in stolen assets.
In response to the freezing of funds, attackers began to change their behavior. In particular, they turned to the Russian Garantex. Garantex was sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury in April 2022 on charges of money laundering. However, the Moscow Exchange continues to operate.
Earlier, Elliptic reported that crypto assets that were stolen from Atomic Wallet wallets began to flow to the Sinbad service, popular with Lazarus Group hackers.
The most affected Atomic Wallet user lost 1,897 ETH ($3.5 million). Also, the five largest wallets from which the hackers withdrew funds lost $9.7 million in total. The only way to protect assets for Atomic Wallet users is to transfer funds to new addresses, moreover, created using other software.
Source: Bits
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