US authorities urged DeFi operators to block stolen funds after a technical malfunction unexpectedly interrupted the hackers' cross-chain laundering activity.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has blamed North Korea's TraderTraitor operation for stealing more than $6 billion from Binance.
In an Oct. 31 security alert, the agency attributed the Oct. 29 attack to North Korean cyber actors, providing official US government confirmation of the perpetrators behind one of history's largest cryptocurrency thefts.
The FBI said investigators working alongside the US Secret Service and IRS Criminal Investigation had observed the attackers converting stolen assets primarily into Ethereum.
It warned that the hackers were expected to move those holdings through decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and instant swap services to obscure their origins.
To disrupt those efforts, the agency published hundreds of cryptocurrency addresses associated with the theft and urged THORNode operators, RPC node operators, DeFi platforms, instant exchanges and other service providers to block transactions involving the identified wallets.
The FBI's intervention comes as blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis has identified sophisticated laundering operations already underway across decentralized platforms.
According to Chainalysis, the hackers have been using DeFi lending protocols on Tron to circumvent stablecoin freezes, which have already restricted approximately $3 billion in stolen assets.
The technique involves converting TRX into stablecoins, depositing those assets into lending protocols, and receiving deposit receipt tokens that stablecoin issuers cannot directly freeze.
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