The U.S. government appears to have been the latest target of cybercriminals in the world of digital assets. Blockchain analytics firm Arkham said that wallets tied to the government seemed to have been compromised.
In an Oct. 24 post on X, Arkham noted that $20 million worth of funds were “suspiciously moved” from a government-linked address to an unknown address. The funds in question are seemingly linked to the assets seized from the infamous Bitfinex hackers, who were arrested in February 2022 nearly six years after the original hack.
“The funds were moved to wallet 0x348 which has begun selling the funds to ETH. We believe the attacker has already begun laundering the proceeds through suspicious addresses linked to a money laundering service,” said Arkham.
Arkham first flagged the movement of funds to a new address an hour earlier on X, prompting pseudonymous blockchain sleuth ZachXBT to investigate the flow of funds thereafter.
“TLDR it’s a likely theft as funds tied to the USG [U.S. government] started going to instant exchanges like N exchange, Switchain, and Binance nested service,” noted ZachZBT.
Other on-chain analytics firms also began tracking the movement of funds shortly after. Lookonchain noted that the attacker had stolen $13.7 million aUSDC, $5.44 million USDC, $1.12 USDT and $447,000 worth of ETH.
“Notably, hackers transferred 148 ETH ($372.6K) to 10 Binance deposit wallets,” said Lookonchain.
Despite a decline in illicit activity onchain in 2024, stolen funds inflows nearly doubled from $857 million to $1.58 billion, according to data from Chainalysis.
