$6.5 Million Worth of Stolen Assets Traced to Tornado Cash

2024 has been a year of many intriguing headlines for the crypto community and cyberattacks are having a fair share of the headline topics. Recall that in July this year, WazirX fell victim to hackers, which caused the cryptocurrency exchange platform major losses reaching over $230 million.

Recently, a part of the stolen funds was reportedly transferred to a mixer platform in Ethereum tokens. The total worth of the transferred tokens was measured to be about 2,600 Ethereums which equates to $6.5 million, PeckShield reports. PeckShield’s reputation as a security firm with pedigree in the blockchain world adds credibility to the update.

While still facing sanctions from the US government, Tornado Cash may just have been implicated furthermore by the hacker’s action to send 2,600 ETH to its crypto mixer platform. Why would the hackers transfer a part of the stolen funds to a mixer platform? A crypto mixer makes it difficult for legitimate owners or security agencies to monitor crypto acquired through fraudulent means or even recover them. This is because crypto mixers taint the details of transactions such that it is difficult to identify the owners of tokens, their origin, and their transfer destination.

Responding to the loss, the management of WazirX conducted polls for its community, which involved asking customers to shoulder 45% of WazirX’s losses. This plan by the company to socialize its losses received expected criticisms. Despite the backlash, it is expected that WazirX will go ahead with the loss socializing plan. Should they go ahead with this plan, users may not get back all their investments on the platform as the crypto exchange platform struggles to balance the books between its assets and collaterals. At the moment, trading activities including withdrawals have been placed on hold.

There are speculations that the attack on WazirX was perpetuated by a state sponsored cybercriminal group known as the North Korean Lazarus Group. The group’s notoriety for high profile hacking came to limelight when they carried out a cybertheft operation in 2022 that saw Ronin sidechain lose about $600 million.