Movement of Stolen Funds from Poloniex: Hackers Transfer Millions to Tornado Cash

After the major theft of cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex, the hacker responsible began moving considerable amounts of Ethereum (ETH) to the Tornado Cash mixing service, according to information from the Arkham platform, which specializes in deanonymizing digital assets. In detail, 1,126.1 ETH were transferred, which corresponds to more than 3.4 million dollars, distributed in 20 transactions that took place between Monday and Tuesday. This move marks the hacker’s first activities on the controversial cryptocurrency mixer.

The Poloniex robbery took place in early November and resulted in the theft of 56 million dollars in ETH, 48 million in Tron (TRX), 18 million in Bitcoin (BTC), in addition to smaller amounts in other digital assets. The exchange, under the ownership of Tron founder Justin Sun, offered a 5% white hat reward, which was not accepted by the criminal. According to Arkham, the hacker still holds approximately $181.47 million in crypto assets at his main address.

In recent months, entities associated with Justin Sun have been frequent targets of cyberattacks. In September, HTX, another Sun-linked exchange, was exploited, resulting in the loss of around 4,999 ETH, valued at $7.9 million, as reported for the PeckShield, a blockchain security company.

New attacks occurred in November, when both HTX and Heco Bridge were compromised, totaling a loss of 100 million dollars, according to data from the cybersecurity company Cyvers. More recently, in January, HTX suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which caused a brief service outage.

DDoS attacks are malicious attempts to overload a website’s infrastructure with excessive traffic, with the aim of taking the service offline.

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