Security News > 2023 > February > Norway finds a way to recover crypto North Korea pinched in Axie heist
Norwegian authorities announced on Thursday that they had recovered $5.9 million of cryptocurrency stolen in the Axie Infinity hack - an incident widely held to have been perpetrated by the Lazarus Group, which has links to North Korea.
The Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime has called the seizure among the largest ever money seizures - and the largest-ever related to crypto - made by Norway.
In March 2022, $620 million was stolen when attackers gained access to five out of nine private keys used by transaction validators for Ronin Network - the Ethereum-based DeFi decentralized finance platform used by Sky Mavis.
Once the attackers gained access to the organization they approved crypto transactions, then immediately began to launder the money through Ethereum-based crypto mixer Tornado Cash, which is now the target of US sanctions.
Thursday was a bad day for crypto crooks with ties to the Korean peninsula.
The implosion of Terraform Labs's TerraUSD "Stablecoin" and linked "Luna" tokens set off what has been called "Crypto winter." The crash was marketed as impossible, because the cryptocurrency's value was pegged to the US dollar.