Chainalysis Pins $387M Bitget Hack on North Korea

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis has attributed last month's $387 million Bitget exchange hack to North Korea, adding its weight to a growing consensus that Pyongyang's hackers were behind one of the year's largest crypto thefts.

The breach occurred on September 24th, with the attackers swiftly moving funds across multiple blockchains. In the first three hours, $387 million left Bitget across 23 transfers and landed on four networks: Ethereum, which took nearly half at 49.7%, followed by XRP at 40.8%, Zcash at 7.6% and Tron at 1.8%. The stolen funds were then laundered through various protocols to obscure the trail.

Chainalysis leaned on in-house AI to keep pace with the investigation, building custom automation that compressed what it estimated as more than 20 hours of manual bridge reconciliation into under 10 minutes. However, the firm stressed that humans still directed the work, with AI accelerating investigators rather than replacing them.