After nearly four months of recovery efforts, WazirX, the largest cryptocurrency exchange operating in India, has frozen $3 million worth of USDT from last year. A devastating security breach worth $230 million In July.

This comes as WazirX undergoes “restructuring measures” and works to “trace and recover stolen assets,” according to a statement shared with Decryption He reads.

The freezing of a portion of stablecoins related to the incident represents WazirX's first significant breakthrough in a complex recovery effort that includes multiple legal actions across jurisdictions.

In November last year, WazirX co-founder Nischal Shetty open In a town hall meeting, the exchange is working on recovery efforts and has plans to reopen trading by February this year.

Recovery efforts and lawsuits

The massive one Security breach What happened last year in July led to 45% of the stock market's reserves being exposed to risk.

Initial investigations over the weeks following the incident primarily targeted Ethereum-based ERC-20 tokens stored in hot wallets.

On 28 August 2024, the High Court of Singapore granted WazirX's parent company, Zettai Pte Ltd, a four-month moratorium on the restructuring of its liabilities pending investigations into the breach.

On the same day, competing platform CoinSwitch was launched I filed a lawsuit Over $9.7 million in funds locked, including Rs 28.7 lakh in ERC-20 tokens and Rs 39.9 lakh in other digital assets.

By September of that year, analysts from Arkham Intelligence were able to do just that path Nearly $50 million of the stolen funds moved through Tornado Cash, with threat actors accelerating money laundering activities through the privacy tool in subsequent months.

The most recent and largest transfer was traced to September 25, four months ago, worth about $10 million in Ethereum.

The exchange followed this up in October by announcing plans to do so Detection of 240,000 wallet addresses The balances are in court testimony, which is part of the Transparency During Debt Restructuring Initiative.

Denying threatening actors

Crypto exchange update on recovery efforts follows A Joint statement From the United States, Japan and South Korea, which was published this week. The statement attributed the attacks to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea), including the notorious Lazarus Group.

The statement said that these attacks constitute a “major threat to the safety and stability of the international financial system.”

The three countries claimed in the statement that it was published with the aim of depriving threat actors of any revenues that could be obtained from these exploits, to be used to obtain “illegal weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes.”

WazirX hack ranks third among The largest cryptocurrency hacks and exploitations It was recorded in 2024, after PlayDapp's loss of $290 million and DMM Bitcoin's losses of $308 million.

Modified by Stacey Elliott.