• On Jan. 15, 2023, onchain researchers discovered that funds stolen during the Harmony bridge attack had been moved.
• The stolen funds, worth $63.2 million at current exchange rates, were deposited into OKEx, Huobi, and Binance.
• Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao confirmed that the funds had been frozen and 124 BTC had been recovered.

On June 23 of last year, the Harmony development team disclosed that $100 million in cryptocurrency funds had been stolen from the Horizon bridge. After 206 days, onchain researcher Zachxbt discovered that 41,000 ETH (worth $63.2 million at current exchange rates) had been transferred. The suspected thieves, who are allegedly associated with the North Korean hacking syndicate Lazarus Group, had deposited the funds into OKEx, Huobi, and Binance.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, commonly known as „CZ,“ confirmed that the funds had been frozen and that 124 BTC had been recovered. CZ tweeted, „We detected Harmony One hacker fund movement. They previously tried to launder through Binance and we froze their accounts. This time they used Huobi. We assisted the Huobi team in freezing their accounts. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered.“

The blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic also discovered the movement of the stolen funds and identified an address associated with the hack. Elliptic CEO James Smith stated that the company had identified the address as a high-risk address and had notified multiple exchanges so they could take appropriate action.

In response to the Harmony bridge attack, the Ethereum community has taken steps to ensure similar hacks don’t occur in the future. Ethereum developers have implemented a new security protocol called EIP-1778, which requires funds to be held in special smart contracts and prevents them from being moved without authorization. This protocol is designed to prevent hackers from exploiting multi-signature wallets, as was done in the Harmony bridge attack.

The incident serves as a reminder to the cryptocurrency community of the importance of security protocols and the need for exchanges to take extra precautions when it comes to frozen funds. It is encouraging to see onchain researchers and exchanges working together to freeze funds and protect users from malicious actors.