Cyber criminals stole approximately 550 million dollars in NEM via the Coincheck platform, a cryptomonnaie that is very popular in Asia and particularly in Japan. (I see you coming, nothing to do with the name itself...)
Coincheck was of course negligent since its NEM were stored in a software wallet accessible from the net (hot wallet) whereas the rule is rather to keep this kind of large sum in several cold wallets (disconnected and on physical supports not supplied).
And according to South Korean intelligence, this flight was organized by North Korean hackers. The latter allegedly sent an email containing malware to Coincheck employees, thereby gaining access to the company's computers.
Massive cryptomarket thefts happen from time to time, but cybercriminals often find themselves stuck in the laundering stage. However the hackers of Coincheck thought of everything since they set up on the darknet, an automated platform of exchange, making it possible to exchange Bitcoins against NEM with a reduction of 15% on the tariff. In other words, people have thrown themselves on the right deal.
As a result, a large proportion of the stolen NEMs were laundered quickly, even before the NEM Foundation could brand the criminals' crypto addresses, which would have had the effect of blocking their accounts. Indeed, this marking system called Mosaic is rather slow and it takes 2 to 3 minutes to tag each account. The thieves simply used this latency time to transfer the NEMs between different accounts, and then place them on exchange platforms, thus escaping marking.
So it would be about 100 million dollars that have been recovered in Bitcoin via this website and that are probably being converted into green bills via various anonymizing means.
For his part Coincheck promised that he would pay back the looted customers to author of 400 million yen, but for the time being, the site remains closed. Hmm.
The investigation is ongoing, but the North Korean lead appears to be favoured by investigators. Moreover, the site used to launder the NEMs has simply disappeared displaying the following photo of Kim-Jong-Un surrounded by banknotes. We'll appreciate the humor.
:p
