FBI: North Korean hackers behind $620M Axie Infinity theft

The FBI has announced that North Korean state-sponsored threat groups Lazarus and BlueNorOff, also known as APT38, perpetrated the theft of $620 million in Ethereum from Axie Infinity's Ronin network bridge last month, which is the largest cryptocurrency hack of all time, according to BleepingComputer. "The FBI, in coordination with Treasury and other U.S. government partners, will continue to expose and combat the [Democratic People's Republic of Korea]'s use of illicit activities — including cybercrime and cryptocurrency theft — to generate revenue for the regime," said the FBI. The Ronin hack also involved the use of a new Lazarus Group-associated ETH address for receiving the stolen funds, which has already been sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. "Today, OFAC added a new ETH address to Lazarus Group’s SDN entry as an identifier: 0x098B716B8Aaf21512996dC57EB0615e2383E2f96. That address was involved in the Ronin hack, having received 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC from the Ronin Bridge smart contract during the attack," said Chainalysis, which first identified the ETH address.