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How was the Axie Infinity hacker blocked from laundering money?

In the past few days, gamers and investors of the NFT game Axie Infinity have been anxiously watching developments surrounding the hacker who stole hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from this hit game.

On April 15, a representative of Tornado Cash, one of the most popular money laundering tools today, said that it had blocked transactions with crypto wallet addresses that are on the sanctions list of the US Department of the Treasury. Currently, this list has just been added to the e-wallet address of the hacker group that carried out the attack on Axie Infinity’s Ronin network.

How was Axie Infinity hacker blocked from money laundering?  - Photo 1.

Announcement on Twitter by Tornado Cash about blocking transactions to the crypto address of Lazarus – the hacker group believed to be the main culprit in the withdrawal of hundreds of millions of dollars from the NFT game Axie Infinity

This is considered a positive cooperation move between Tornado Cash and US authorities when the ban was applied less than a day after the FBI and the US Department of Finance added e-wallet addresses to the list. punishment book. Accordingly, US financial companies will not be able to conduct any transactions with these e-wallets. The FBI said that the above address belongs to the Lazarus hacker group. By complying with the Tornado Cash ban, Lazarus’ wallet address will not be able to transfer funds directly to the network to remove traces like before.

How was the Axie Infinity hacker blocked from laundering money?  - Photo 2.

However, contrary to what many people think, Tornado Cash’s decision raises doubts about the neutrality of this tool, although it does not really stop hackers’ families if money is transferred to a network. other electronic accounts.

Responding to concerns about the possibility of accounts being tampered with by third parties when using Tornado Cash, co-founder Roman Semenov gave an official explanation. He said this transaction blocking only happens on the user interface (application level) while the blockchain’s protocol is immutable. The BlockCrypto site quoted Semenov as saying that “Tornado Cash itself cannot be closed by sanctions”. Semenov also admitted that there’s not much Tornado Cash can do right now to prevent hackers from laundering money because it’s nearly impossible to comply with sanctions given the decentralized protocol it uses.

How was Axie Infinity hacker blocked from money laundering?  - Photo 3.

Currently, Tornado Cash is considered one of the most effective money laundering tools. It works according to the general principles of money laundering software, acting as a mixer (mixer) to wipe out traces of illegal money sources. To make it easier to understand, the hacker’s money laundering process will start with transferring the extracted money into a “mixing” software, after which the money will be returned to the corresponding account, but the origin of the money has been changed. change. Thanks to the advantage of neutrality in financial management, Tornado Cash has become a commonly used tool. According to Elliptic, as of April 14, about 20% of the total stolen ETH ($80.3 million) has been transferred to this tool by the hacker group Axie Infinity.

https://gamek.vn/hacker-vu-axie-infinity-da-bi-chan-rua-tien-nhu-the-nao-20220419112109535.chn

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