Atomic Wallet hacker used a cryptomixer popular with North Korean hackers

Atomic Wallet cryptocurrency wallet representative said that his team is “doing everything possible” to recover the stolen funds. And advised the victims of the incident to track the hacker’s transactions themselves

An Atomic Wallet cryptocurrency hacker who stole about $35 million in user funds. He used Sinbad.io, a cryptomixer popular with North Korean hackers, to launder the stolen funds, Elliptic blockchain analysts said.

Atomic Wallet, a cryptocurrency service for non-custodial storage of digital assets, was hacked in early June. The attack stole Bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT), Dogecoin (DOGE), Litecoin (LTC), BNB (BNB) and Polygon (MATIC) totaling at least $35 million from Atomic customers.

Elliptic found out that the hacker started transferring funds via Sinbad.io, a transaction anonymization service. And which is used by the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group. North Korean hackers laundered over $100 million through Sinbad io.

Analysts have not named the amount of Atomic users’ funds spent through the mixer. But they did say that Sinbad.io is probably a revamped version of Blender.io, a service heavily used by Lazarus Group. And the first mixer to be sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department.

The Atomic Wallet team is “doing everything they can” to recover the stolen funds. But creating a concrete plan is possible only after the investigation is complete. Atomic Wallet marketing director Roland Sede told Cointelegraph.

According to him, having victims of the attack track and report illegal transfers to cryptocurrency exchanges could prevent scammers from withdrawing funds. For its part, the site is doing just that. Because “the more attention hackers get, the harder it is for them (funds) to move them,” Sede said.

Our experts note that according to Atomic Wallet, the hack affected “less than 1%” of the service’s monthly active users. The attack was also stopped on Saturday, May 3. But Twitter users responded with screenshots showing that their funds were stolen even after that time.