Victim of largest cryptocurrency heist in history announces bounty to hunt hackers

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit was hacked on Friday last week, resulting in $1.5 billion worth of Ethereum being stolen, marking what is being reported as the largest cryptocurrency heist in history.

Bybit officials confirmed more than 400,000 Ethereum, along with staked Ethereum coins, were stolen from the cryptocurrency exchange on Friday last week, and now Bybit has announced a new bounty program to incentivize the public to track down the stolen funds.

According to the announcement, every time someone traces and freezes some of the stolen funds, 5% of the amount is transferred to the person who discovered the funds, and 5% goes to the "entity" that froze the funds, for a total of 10%. The program has already paid out $4.23 million in bounties to five bounty hunters.

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For those who don't know, Bybit claims the culprits behind the hack are the North Korean government-backed group Lazarus, which is known for its illegal movements in the cryptocurrency space as the group managed to steal approximately $650 million in cryptocurrencies just within 2024. Bybit CEO and co-founder Ben Zhou shared the preliminary results of a forensic investigation into the heist on Wednesday, which was led by two companies, Sygnia Labs and Verichains.

The preliminary results concluded the "root cause" of the attack was malicious code traced to the infrastructure of SafeWallet, the platform hosting the Ethereum Multisig Cold Wallet of Bybit, which contained the now stolen $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum.

"We will not stop until Lazarus or bad actors in the industry is eliminated. In the future we will open it up to other victims of Lazarus as well," said Zhou referring to the Lazarus Group

• Read more: North Korea pulled off the biggest cryptocurrency heist in history