Last week, the United States Department of Treasury linked the North Korean hacker group, Lazarus to an Ethereum wallet address utilized in the $622M Ronin Network attack, a sidechain for the P2E game Axie Infinity in March.

The Treasury Department’s OFAC recently included 3 ETH wallet addresses on its blacklist, one of which is already linked to the Ronin breach. According to the Treasury’s post on Twitter on 23rd April, the new restrictions were imposed on the wallet addresses to avoid North Korea from trying to evade the sanctions of the United States and the United Nations.

Dirty Cash Moved

Blockchain technology records show that at least one of those Ethereum wallet addresses connected to the Ronin hackers giving funds to platforms like the Tornado Cash, which helps people buy and sell cryptocurrency. According to the Treasury, assuming you buy or sell anything from these people or places, you could be hit with a United States embargo. As a result, more sanctions may be imposed.

State-sponsored Lazarus has now been added to the list of people and businesses that have been banned from doing business with the crypto assets. It is important since a transaction-mixing service called Tornado Cash said early last week that it’d automatically block any Ethereum wallet addresses on the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s sanctions list.

Chainalysis, a company that analyzes blockchain technology, made a tool that allows the sound system to blacklist certain Ethereum wallet addresses on the consumer decentralized operating system that Tornado Cash’s technicians can regulate. However, this regulatory instrument can still be circumvented if people use the protocols themselves.

Greatest Ethereum Hack Ever

People broke into the so-called bridge that connects the Ronin Network to ETH. In March, this resulted in the embezzlement of about $622M worth of Ethereum and USDC stablecoins. Based on a comment by Sky Mavis of Axie Infinity, the bridge got infiltrated, and the hacker was able to sign bogus payments using breached private keys.

Based on a report by Chainalysis, North Korea took over $400M in cryptocurrency through cyberattacks last year, meaning that the Ronin hack could be the country’s largest so far. According to sources, the majority of illicit funds associated with the isolated nation’s hacking groups were held in Ethereum (60%), BTC (20%), and other tokens (20%).

Recovering the Cryptocurrency That Has Been Stolen

In similar events, Binance announced on 22nd April that it had retrieved $5M from the Ronin blockchain breach. Changpeng Zhao, CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance claims 86 of his accounts received the funds. The United States authorities have pursued hydra, Guarantee, and BitRiver for their links to ransomware and different illicit transactions.