The individual responsible for the cyber attack on the decentralized cross-chain protocol Orbit Bridge in December has started to transfer the stolen cryptocurrency.
Arkham, the platform that reveals the identities of digital assets, has observed that the hacker moved 8,671 Ethereum (ETH) valued at $32 million to a new wallet. The hacker is now in the process of depositing the stolen crypto into Tornado Cash, a contentious coin mixing service that enables anonymous transactions of digital assets.
The hacker managed to steal over $100 million in cryptocurrency from Orbit Bridge at the end of December, and currently still holds $66 million in ETH, along with more than $20 million in stablecoins DAI and USDT.
Orbit Bridge acts as a bridge for Orbit Chain (ORC), a cross-chain platform that focuses on scalability.
After the security breach, the Orbit Chain team issued warnings to the hacker, urging them to come forward by 10:00 AM on January 11th. However, the hacker did not respond, prompting the project to offer a reward of up to $8 million for any information leading to the identification of the hacker or the recovery of the stolen funds.
At the time of writing, Orbit Chain’s native token, ORC, is trading at $0.00669, down over 90% from its price in December, as reported by CoinGecko.
In 2022, the US imposed sanctions on Tornado Cash for national security reasons. One of the founders of the project, Roman Storm, was arrested last year on charges related to allegedly laundering $1 billion in criminal funds, including hundreds of millions for the Lazarus Group, a North Korean cybercriminal organization under sanctions.
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