Hackers, Attackers, Exploiters

GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and it's clobbering time.

⭐️Today's selection:

• 🗣Hackers, Hackers, Hackers
• 😎Cool Fact Tuesday
• 👌Selected Meme of The Day
• 📰Bite-Sized News

HACKERS, HACKERS, HACKERS

The FBI has officially announced the results of its investigation into the Harmony Bridge attack. Lazarus Group, a North Korean group, was involved.

It's almost surreal that the most notorious hacker group out there... is from North Korea. The coincidences make the whole thing feel like it's written by George R. R. Martin.

But it is what it is.

It was one of the biggest crypto-robberies of the past year.

It resulted in the hackers pocketing in $100 million. And recently, the criminals were noticed trying to launder about $60 million of this amount.

They used RAILGUN anonymizer for the transactions, but they still managed to intercept and freeze some of the funds thanks to cryptocurrency exchanges Huobi and Binance.

This allowed investigators to confidently identify the perpetrators. In addition to Lazarus Group, another cyber group APT38 was involved in the crime.

At the end of the report, the FBI traditionally pledged to "continue to crack down on crimes related to North Korea and their attempts to launder money."

Detectives allege that Korean cyber criminals are working at the behest of the authorities. I mean... Who could have guessed...

North Korean hacker cyber warfare unit definitely doesn't sound like an exemplary initiative that's overflown with the entrepreneurial spirit...

Reality is that the Lazarus Group is considered to be one of the most successful crypto-hacking organizations in the world.

Experts estimate that they stole over $1 billion in the first 7 months of last year.

These hackers are credited with the $620 million hack of the Ronin cross-chain bridge, as well as other high-profile thefts.

Cross-chain bridges are the most frequent targets chosen by such attackers.

It's because cross-chain bridges' protocols make it possible digital assets to be transported from one blockchain to another.

According to experts, almost 70% of stolen assets were stolen from cross-chain bridges last year.

And that's it. Or is it? No, that's not it.

There's news about another, mysterious hacker who got their name by successfully attacking Wormhole, the otherworldly-sounding crypto platform.

Here's what happened:

In February, 2022, Wormhole Bridge lost about 120,000 Wrapped Ether tokens (WETH), which were worth about $325 million at the time.

The hacker managed to bypass protocol checks and mint WETH tokens, then sold about 94,000 of those coins for ETH on the Ethereum network. They then exchanged the rest for other altcoins on the Solana network.

The Wormhole team offered the hacker a $10 million reward if they would come to their senses and return the funds. But the requests went unanswered.

To avoid significant inflation that would undermine user confidence in the bridge, Wormhole's parent company Jump Crypto made up the missing 120,000 ETH from its reserves.

Now the mysterious Wormhole attacker was spotted moving $155 million to OpenOcean (a decentralized liquidity protocol that enables cross-chain trading).

Then the anonymous hacker converted the assets to stETH and wstETH, and transferred it all over different DeFi protocols.

This grabbed crypto community's attention precisely by how the hacker was making a lot of strange transactions.

Thanks to blockchain, these transactions can be observed. Yet, tings like crypto mixers, anonymizers, and similar stuff exist. The hacker is sure to take advantage of them.

TL;DR: Lazarus, the North Korean cyber warfare unit, was officially involved in the infamous Harmony Bridge attack. Apart from that, the Wormhole Bridge exploiter was recently spotted moving $155 million.

COOL FACT TUESDAY

Here's something cool to be aware of.

In 2023, we have a lot of supply unlocks ahead of us. But what's that?

Imagine early investors investing into a particular token. Sometimes they receive an amount of these tokens, but they are locked.

An unlock is when a particular date arrives and investors gain access to the tokens they bought. Before an unlock they couldn't sell it. Now they can.

XRP may undergo a tumultuous phase in 2023. More than $17.9 billion in unlocks are incoming.

So be sure to consider the number of coins released from the total supply, and think about avoiding crypto projects in which the majority of coins belong to future unlocks (more than 50%).

Because such unlocks could really affect the token's value, and it's better to know what to expect.

But as soon as this week there will be large-scale unlocks of these tokens: AXS, ACA, GAL, RON, YGG and IMX:

• 4.89 million AXS ($63.18 million) will be unlocked on January 23.
• 42.93 million RON (about $24.25 million) will be unlocked on January 27.
• IMX tokens worth or around $12.5 million will also be unlocked on January 28.

Here's a more informative chart about what projects have the most unlocks awaiting in line in the future:

SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY

BITE-SIZED NEWS

• Ethereum Developers Launch Shanghai Mainnet Shadow Fork. What they do in the shadows.
• Japanese Financial Services Agency to Allow the Distribution of Stablecoins. Stable progress.
• Europol Seized Over $19 Million Worth of Crypto from Wallets Tied to Bitzlato. Suddenly everything's about Bitzlato.