Atomic Wallet Hacked, a mobile and desktop cryptocurrency wallet, announced on Twitter today that it had already blocked a part of the stolen funds amounting to at least $35 million.
"We continue to work with leading blockchain analysis companies to trace stolen funds. Part is already blocked in cooperation with major exchanges," the team behind the wallet software stated in a tweet. Yet, this information does not sound reassuring to many of the exploit’s victims, who have been complaining about the lack of thorough updates from the company and a delayed announcement of the hack that did not allow many of Atomic Wallet’s users to protect their funds.
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"Blocked just means the hackers can’t unload on some of the major exchanges. They didn’t say they recovered any of the funds, these updates are very weak. Can we get an update on if any funds were recovered and how they would be refunded back to users?" co-host of the Good Morning Crypto Show and Late Night Crypto, researcher Johny Krypto, commented on the Atomic Wallet’s post.
Some members of the cryptocurrency community believe Atomic Crypto Wallet cannot do much about stolen funds. "They either compensate for the losses of users from the company's funds, the probability of which is extremely small, or do not compensate at all. It is physically impossible to hack the thousands of wallets of the hacker group," Twitter user DyuldinKS expressed skepticism about the possibility of recovering lost funds.
Needless to say, many users of Atomic Wallet wish to get their money back and hope for a refund. Some of them believe this is the way the company can "still stay reliable."
Meanwhile, the wallet’s team also tweeted, "According to detectives, the attack was coordinated by a team of professional hackers," adding, "The security investigation is still ongoing."
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It is possible that Elliptic, a blockchain analytics company, is one of the detectives mentioned by Atomic Wallet. Yesterday, Elliptic reported the new information discovered by its Investigations Team.
"Elliptic’s Investigations Team has traced funds from the $35 million Atomic Wallet hack to Sinbad.io, a mixer used to launder over $100 million in crypto assets stolen by North Korea’s Lazarus Group," the Web3 analytics firm stated in a blog post, claiming that "the stolen funds are being swapped for Bitcoin before being laundered through the Sinbad.io mixer."
According to Elliptic, Sinbad is one of the cryptocurrency mixers extensively used by North Korea’s Lazarus Group. As per the company’s estimation, at least $100 million stolen by the notorious hackers was laundered with the help of Sinbad.io.
"This includes assets from the $540 million Axie Infinity hack and $100 million Horizon Bridge attack," Elliptic added.
Furthermore, the Investigations Team suspects Sinbad.io is actually a rebranded version of Blender.io. This one, in turn, was also one of the cryptocurrency mixers preferred by Lazarus Group.
