US suspects North Korea of ​​millions of hack nft game Axie Infinity

The FBI attributes the attack on NFT game Axie Infinity to Lazarus Group, state hackers from North Korea. The US Treasury Department has added an ethereum address to a list of sanctions against North Korea.

The FBI has concluded after an investigation that the theft of $ 625 million via Axie Infinity by the North Korean Lazarus group committed, reports Sky Mavis, the Vietnamese company behind the game. That notification came after the US Treasury Department put an ethereum address named Ronin Bridge Exploiter on its sanctions list against the country. That address contains almost 148,000 ethereum, converted about 416 million euros.

Axie Infinity is a very popular play-to-earn game that allows users to earn Ethereum-based Axie Infinity Shards and Smoot Love Potions tokens, which they can cash out. Sky Mavis had set up the Ronin Network to port tokens from the Ethereum network for cost reasons, but the connection between Ronin and Ethereum proved vulnerable, allowing criminals to siphon more than $570 million worth of cryptocurrencies at the end of March.

In total, the theft involved 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5 million USDC through two transactions. The group used five compromised validator private keys. Sky Mavis is still in the process of implementing additional security measures at the Ronin Bridge. The company expects to be able to put the Ronin Bridge back into use by the end of this month.