Bybit has already paid more than $4 million to bounty hunters who helped trace and freeze some of the stolen funds.

Bybit, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, experienced a hack Friday in which over $1.4 billion worth of crypto was stolen, according to blockchain-analytics firms. It’s the latest incident for an industry struggling with security concerns that present hurdles to mainstream adoption.

Bybit has officially filled the $1.4 billion hole left by one of the biggest crypto hacks in history. CEO Ben Zhou announced that the exchange

The Lazarus Group, a cybercrime syndicate linked to North Korea, has long been a thorn in the side of the crypto industry. Since 2017, the group has stolen over $6 billion in digital assets, funneling the proceeds into the country’s ballistic missile program. The Bybit heist alone accounts for nearly a quarter of that total.

Crypto exchange Bybit said it was hacked, resulting in what analysts estimate was the loss of almost $1.5 billion worth of tokens in the biggest theft ever committed in the industry. Researchers believe North Korean hackers were likely responsible.

The malicious Javascript code used in the attack could secretly modify transactions for SafeWallet, a cryptocurrency wallet provider.

Less than 72 hours later, Zhou said Bybit had restored the exchange’s balance and kept customer withdrawals open, although he did not account for the stolen crypto. The scale of the Bybit theft surpasses the previous record of a $615 million heist of Ethereum and U.

Bybit CEO Ben Zhou announced that the exchange has fully recovered its Ethereum (ETH) reserves following a massive $1.5 billion exploit on February 21. He confirmed that a new audited Proof of Reserves (POR) report will soon be released to prove that client assets are once again backed 1:1.

After exchange operator loses ether from a cold wallet in a North Korea-linked attack, bitcoin and ether fall as industry enthusiasm wanes.

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