Bybit CEO Posts A Bounty On Lazarus Group After The Recent $1.4 Billion Hack
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Bybit CEO Ben Zhou decided to launch a counteroffensive against the North Korean hacking collective known as Lazarus Group. The move comes less than a week after the hackers stole over $1.4 billion from Bybit, which was then also followed by $5 billion in outflows, causing the exchange to take up a loan to cover withdrawals.
Now, Zhou called on crypto users as well as other companies in the industry to join forces and track down the stolen assets, hoping to recover them. He also unveiled a new bounty website that offers 10% in rewards, or $140 million, to those who help intercept the funds.
He explained that there is an assigned team that would keep the new website updated and that Bybit does not intend to stop until Lazarus or whoever else may be responsible is eliminated. He also said that this operation will grow moving forward, expanding to include other victims of Lazarus Group.
The Investigation Has Started And The First Findings Are In
Other than that, Bybit has been quite efficient at handling the issue. It did not halt withdrawals, and even though it has only been five days since the incident, it already managed to fully replace the lost assets, restoring its 1:1 backing of client funds.
Now, with the new bounty website up and running, the platform has already reported results. Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT managed to identify Lazarus Group as the definitive culprit, which drained staked Ethereum (stETH), Mantle Staked ETH (mETH), as well as other ERC-20 tokens.
The blockchain investigator’s findings also suggest that there is a connection between an attack on Bybit and previous hacks of Phemex and BingX, which earned him 50,000 AKM bounty.
The initiative also suggests how big of a problem Lazarus Group became for the crypto industry, especially given that they have stolen over $3 billion in crypto since 2017. Furthermore, the attack on Bybit is now the biggest hack in crypto history to date. While data from security companies like PeckShield suggests that crypto hacks and scams saw a sharp drop in late 2024, a breach of this size has raised fresh concerns regarding the vulnerability of crypto exchanges.
