I love Dan and folks like @mcutler who take the time to write this shit up in glorious detail.
Another lesson: people w deep niche expertise don't get crazy loud w what they know to be true. It can be weird bc they do yell about theoretical specs. Inverse them both. Then, run ๐
Crypto folks (hopefully) already know that Lazarus is one of the most prevalent threat actors targeting this industry.
They rekt more people, companies, protocols than anyone else.
But it's good to know exactly how they get in. Bc another smart contract audit won't save you.
For example, one long-time fave method:
- Contact employee via social/messaging app
- Direct them to a Github for a job offer, "skills test," or to help with a bug
- Rekt individual's device
- Gain entry to company's AWS
- Rekt company (and their users)
When it comes to financial crime, money laundering, etc. everyone goes thru a phase of thinking that the solution is knowing the identity of the account holder.
"if only we knew who moved these assets! then we would be able to catch them and stop crime!"
N O .
Literally NO.
It doesn't work at any scale. It's never worked at any scale. It never will work at any scale.
AML laws and all the related shit don't stop crime or money laundering. And it never has.
And it's really important to note that the implementation is NOT the issue.
The laws are *designed* to detect and block people from accessing the financial system.
And they do exactly that. Really well. So well in fact that like 1/4th of the world's population doesn't have a basic ass bank account.
On Fri June 2nd, thousands of Atomic Wallet users had their wallets drained across basically every chain.
Each theft involved 1-3 new addies. Initially we were only able to link thefts on-chain if they sent gas to multiple addresses.
(green guys are what we put alerts on first)
The lack of consolidation means the majority of addresses collected so far came direct from users sharing their info w/ folks like @zachxbt or w/ Atomic, @elliptic, @SlowMist, etc.
We have no idea how complete our lists are currently, or how long the long tail will be.