Hacking in the crypto industry has become an important part of the space. One of the most important, the Harmony bridge exploit, has been under investigation since the incident. The latest update shows that the largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance and Huobi, have teamed up to recover some of the stolen funds.
The information was disclosed by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) in a tweet sent on January 16. tweeted“We detected the movement of the Harmony One hacker’s funds. He previously tried to launder it through Binance, and we froze the account. This time he used Huobi. We helped the Huobi team in freezing the account. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered. CeFi helped to maintain DeFi SAFU.
Binance And Huobi Team Up To Recover Stolen Funds
In addition to collaborating with security teams at crypto exchanges, Binance and Huobi was able to freeze and recover a large amount of BTC out of the funds stolen from the Harmony bridge exploit.
According to CZ, the hackers tried to launder the exploited funds through the Huobi exchange. After Binance discovered this, they reached out and helped Huobi to freeze and recover digital assets stored by hackers.
Zhao added that he was able to recover approximately 124 BTC, worth more than $2 million, at the time of writing. Prior to the disclosure of CZ, Crypto Sleuth, ZachXBT, reported that’s a hacker buddy Harmony This Bridge exploit is moving around 41,000 Ethereum (ETH), worth around $64 million at the end of last week.
The hackers also combined the funds after they were moved and then deposited in three undisclosed cryptocurrency exchanges ZachXBT.
Summary In Exploiting Harmony Bridge
In June 2022, Harmony disclosed that Horizon Bridge to Harmony layer-1 blockchain has been hacked. According to the team’s explanation via Twitter, the theft resulted in a total of $100 million siphoned from the Ethereum network.
After the exploit, Harmony told various exchanges to close the Horizon bridge so that users could not transact on the bridge and the attacker could not continue the exploit.
The protocol assures the public that the team is cooperating with authorities to identify the thieves, including working with the FBI and various cybersecurity companies.
Overall, the report is well known North Korean hacking organization called ‘Lazarus Group’ is suspected to be behind the Harmony bridge hack as Blockchain analysis company Elliptic noted that the hack method is similar to other Lazarus Group attacks.
Meanwhile, the global cryptocurrency market is currently on a bull run as its market capitalization surpassed $1 trillion after months of hovering below that number. The Harmony ONE token also followed the bullish trend up 4.3% in the last 24 hours with a trading volume of $51.8 million.
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