Atomic Wallet Hack Victims Voice Frustration Over Lack Of Updates; Hackers Possibly Linked To N. Korea

The massive hack on the non-custodial crypto wallet Atomic Wallet that took place over the weekend may be connected to North Korea, but victims of the exploit, which wiped clean the funds of less than 1% of the over 5 million users, are already frustrated due to the lack of major updates from the team.

Users of Atomic Wallet may have fallen victim to the ploy orchestrated by the infamous North Korean group of hackers known as the Lazarus Group, blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic said this week.

The funds siphoned from Atomic Wallet users have been sifted to a crypto mixing tool Sinbad, believed to be the successor of the sanctioned Blender.io, the popular go-to tool Lazarus supposedly used to launder money from its hacks.

The blockchain analytics provider noted the similarity of the Atomic Wallet's hacker's usage pattern with the North Korean infamous hacking group and underlined the connections it uncovered between the hacked wallets and the hacks made by Lazarus.

"Elliptic's analysis suggests that North Korea's Lazarus Group is responsible for the theft of crypto assets suffered by users of Atomic Wallet," the blockchain analytics provider said in a blog post, noting that it is attributing the incident to the hacking group "with a high level of confidence."

While Elliptic did not share the number of funds sent to the crypto mixer, it underlined that the malicious actor swapped the assets for Bitcoin before funneling through the mixing tool

Elliptic did not specify how much was sent to the mixer but noted that the loot was being swapped for Bitcoin before being obfuscated through the mixer.

Last Saturday, multiple Atomic Wallet users took to Twitter and said that they lost their entire portfolio, with several others wondering how they lost their funds since they kept them in a non-custodial wallet.

While Atomic Wallet confirmed the loss of funds, it only said that it is conducting an investigation and sought help from authorities and major crypto platforms.

Since then, major updates coming from the team behind the non-custodial wallet have been scarce, with several individuals, including the popular on-chain sleuth ZachXBT, who was helping with the investigation, pegging that the thieves may have stolen over $35 million in users' funds.

Atomic Wallet downplayed the hack, and on Monday noted that less than 1% of its total active users have fallen prey to hackers, which is still a lot considering that the crypto wallet maker previously said it has more than 5 million users.

Several victims aired their frustrations on the lack of major updates from the Atomic Wallet's camp, most of them eager to know what happened and why the hack took place.

"Seriously the lack of update for the scale of this hack is appalling. Being robbed because of the app security flaw and not by one's carelessness is intolerable," a Reddit user who goes by the name Independent_News9407 said.

Another user emphasized that at this point, "no news is good news," and shared that the team is currently trying to resolve the situation and attempting to retrieve the stolen funds.

The team is "doing everything they can to get those funds back," Atomic Wallet chief marketing officer Roland Säde said, adding that "in order to create a concrete plan, the investigation must be completed."

He further said, "Of course, the team is devastated as we have been very proud about our security. We are working around the clock to get it all resolved and come out of this crisis stronger than before."