Hacking in the crypto industry has been a prominent part of the space. One of the recent significant ones, the Harmony bridge exploit, has been under investigation since it occurred. The latest update indicates that the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, 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 posted on Jan. 16. CZ tweeted, “We detected Harmony One hacker fund movement. They previously tried to launder through Binance, and we froze his accounts. This time he used Huobi. We assisted Huobi’s team in freezing his accounts. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered. CeFi helping to keep DeFi SAFU.”
Binance And Huobi Team Up To Recover Stolen Funds
Alongside a collaboration with security teams at crypto exchanges, Binance and Huobi were able to freeze and recover a large amount of BTC out of the stolen funds from the Harmony bridge exploit.
According to CZ, the hackers tried laundering the exploited funds through the Huobi exchange. After Binance discovered this, they reached out and assisted Huobi in freezing and recovering the digital assets deposited by the hackers.
Zhao added that they were able to recover approximately 124 BTC, which is worth over $2 million, at the time of writing. Prior to CZ disclosure, Crypto Sleuth, ZachXBT, reported that the hacker behind the Harmony Bridge exploit was moving around funds of 41,000 Ethereum (ETH), worth around $64 million in the last weekend.
The hacker also consolidated the funds after moving them around and then deposited them into three distinct cryptocurrency exchanges which ZachXBT did not disclose.
Summary On The Harmony Bridge Exploit
In June 2022, Harmony disclosed that its Horizon Bridge to the Harmony layer-1 blockchain had been hacked. According to the team’s explanation via Twitter, the theft resulted in a total of $100 million siphoned off the network in Ethereum.
Following the exploit, Harmony notified various exchanges to shut down the Horizon bridge so that users will not be able to carry out transactions on the bridge and the attacker will not be able to continue the exploit.
The protocol assured the public then that the team was working with authorities to identify those behind the theft, which included working with the FBI and various cybersecurity firms.
Overall, reports have it that an infamous North Korean hacking organization called ‘Lazarus Group’ is suspected to be behind the Harmony bridge hack as Blockchain analysis firm Elliptic once noted that how the hack was conducted was similar to other Lazarus Group attacks.
Meanwhile, the global cryptocurrency market is currently in a bull run as the market capitalization exceeded $1 trillion after months of hovering below the said amount. Harmony’s token ONE has also followed suit in the bullish trend up by 4.3% in the last 24 hours with a trading volume of $51.8 million.