The lion’s share of the hacked Bybit funds remains to be traceable after the historic cybertheft, as blockchain investigators proceed their efforts to freeze and get better these funds.

The crypto business was rocked by the largest hack in history on Feb. 21, when Bybit lost over $1.4 billion in liquid-staked Ether (stETH), Mantle Staked ETH (mETH) and different digital property.

Blockchain safety corporations, together with Arkham Intelligence, have identified North Korea’s Lazarus Group because the doubtless wrongdoer behind the Bybit exploit, because the attackers have continued swapping the funds in an effort to make them untraceable.

Despite the Lazarus Group’s efforts, over 88% of the stolen $1.4 billion stays traceable, in keeping with Ben Zhou, the co-founder and CEO of Bybit change.

The CEO wrote in a March 20 X post:

“Total hacked funds of USD 1.4bn around 500k ETH. 88.87% remain traceable, 7.59% have gone dark, 3.54% have been frozen.”

“86.29% (440,091 ETH, ~$1.23B) have been converted into 12,836 BTC  across 9,117 wallets (Average 1.41 BTC each),” mentioned the CEO, including that the funds have been primarily funneled by way of Bitcoin (BTC) mixers, together with Wasbi, CryptoMixer, Railgun and Tornado Cash.

The CEO’s replace comes practically a month after the change was hacked. It took the Lazarus Group 10 days to launder 100% of the stolen Bybit funds by way of the decentralized crosschain protocol THORChain, Cointelegraph reported on March 4.

Still, blockchain safety specialists are hopeful {that a} portion of those funds might be frozen and recovered by Bybit.

Related: Can Ether recover above $3K after Bybit’s massive $1.4B hack?

The crypto business wants extra blockchain “bounty hunters” and white hat, or moral hackers, to fight the rising illicit exercise from North Korean actors.

Decoding transaction patterns by way of cryptocurrency mixers stays the most important problem in tracing these funds, Bybit’s CEO wrote, including:

“In the past 30 days, 5012 bounty reports were received of which 63 were valid bounty reports. We welcome more reports, we need more bounty hunters that can decode mixers as we need a lot of help there down the road.”

Bybit paid $2.2 million for Lazarus “bounty hunters”

Bybit has awarded over $2.2 million price of funds to 12 bounty hunters for related data which will result in the freezing of the funds, according to LazarusBounty, an internet site devoted to monitoring Bybit bounty payouts.

The change is providing 10% of the recovered funds as a bounty for white hat hackers and investigators.

Related: Bybit exploit exposes security flaws in centralized crypto exchanges

The Bybit assault highlights that even centralized exchanges with robust safety measures stay vulnerable to sophisticated cyberattacks, analysts say.

“This incident is another stark reminder that even the strongest security measures can be undone by human error,” Lucien Bourdon, an analyst at Trezor, instructed Cointelegraph.

Bourdon defined that attackers used a classy social engineering approach, deceiving signers into approving a malicious transaction that drained crypto from one in all Bybit’s chilly wallets.

The Bybit hack is greater than twice the dimensions of the $600 million Poly Network hack in August 2021, making it the most important crypto change breach so far.

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