During the raid, it was discovered that wallets connected to North Korean cybercriminals and Russian intelligence services had evidence of digital currencies. 

The US criminal prosecutors have booked a Vietnamese man they claim to have run the service since its August 2017 creation. Potentially contaminated funds are gathered by mixers and sent at random to destination wallets. 

Minh Quoc Nguyen, 49, of Hanoi has been accused of money laundering, operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, and identity theft. The FBI has included him on the wanted criminal list. 

Criminals laundering more than $700 million in bitcoin from wallets identified as stolen funds, including money taken by North Korean hackers from Axie Infinity's Ronin Bridge and Harmony's Horizon Bridge, were among the service's customers. 

It has also been reported that APT28, the Russian military intelligence, and Fancy Bear also utilized ChipMixer in order to buy infrastructure used from Kremlin Drovorub malware. Moreover, according to Europol, the Russian RaaS group LockBit was also a patron. 

ChipMixer joins a relatively small group of crypto mixers that have been shut down or approved, enabling criminals to conceal the source of the cryptocurrency obtained illegally. The list presently includes Blender.io, which was probably renamed and relaunched as Sinbad, and Tornado Cash, a favorite of cybercriminals that helped hackers launder more than $7 billion between 2019 and 2022. 

The Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany seized two ChipMixer back-end servers and more than $46 million in cryptocurrencies, while American investigators seized two web domains that pointed to the company. 

According to court documents, ChipMixer has enabled customers to deposit Bitcoin, which would then be mixed with other users’ Bitcoin in order to anonymize the currency. 

Court records state that ChipMixer allowed users to deposit Bitcoin, which was then combined with Bitcoin from other users to make the currency anonymous. But, this mixer took things a step further by converting the deposited money into tiny tokens with an equal value called "chips," which were then combined, further anonymizing the currencies and obscuring the blockchain trails of the funds. This feature of the platform is what attracted so many criminals. 

The domain now displays a seizure notice, stating: “This domain has been seized by the FBI in accordance with a seizure warrant.” 

“Together, with our international partners, we are firmly committed to identifying and investigating cybercriminals who pose a serious threat to our economic security by laundering billions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency under the misguided anonymity of the darknet,” adds Scott Brown, special agent in charge of Homeland Securities Investigations (HSI) Arizona.  

The framework was developed in response to the collapse of the cryptocurrency markets in 2022, which caused authorities worldwide to step up their efforts to establish or enforce protections and left businesses and investors worried about the future of cryptocurrencies. 

These new regulations involve the authorities seeking necessary permits and licenses in order to provide users with one or more crypto-related services in Dubai. The framework is accompanied by seven activity-based rulebooks that specify standards based on the type of service supplied and four mandatory rulebooks for service providers, which Talal Tabbaa, founder of the regional cryptocurrency exchange CoinMENA, hailed as being "elegantly designed."  

Dubai is one among the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates with a goal to emerge as a global hub for crypto and blockchain activities, and in order to accomplish this it was courting companies to systemize the jurisdiction even before publishing its strategized rules for the sector. 

In the wake of the new rules being published, the institutional crypto custody provider Hex Trust became one of the first to receive an operational green light from the emirate's watchdog, the Virtual Asset Regulation Authority. Stating the time before VARA, which was established in 2022, Mohamed Reda El Sheikh, head of compliance at Hex Trust for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) says "We were waiting for a licensing framework. We were waiting for somebody with interest to take the responsibility." 

However, these new regulations set up by Dubai are still a work in progress, because of their comprehensive nature, which allows for potential development. The emerging hub's new regulatory structure also reveals the expense of compliance in the area, which may make it more difficult for start-up businesses to locate there. 

While Tabbaa called the licencing costs "peanuts" when compared to other operating costs like hiring staff or maintaining offices locally, and compliance fees are not something crypto companies focus on when looking to enter a market, even he acknowledges that some of Dubai's fees can be viewed as being on the expensive side. 

A company seeking to provide exchange services is required to pay an application cost of 100,000 UAE dirham (US$27,200) and an annual supervision fee that is double that amount, says the document. The application fee does not guarantee acceptance, and if the business wishes to provide additional services such as custody, lending, or payments, it must submit additional licensing applications (at a 50% reduction off the application charge) and pay additional monitoring fees. 

For comparison, the application fee in Abu Dhabi, another emirate of the UAE, is $20,000, while the yearly monitoring fee is $15,000. However, the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) stated in an email to CoinDesk that goes up if businesses seek to provide additional kinds of assets. 

“Apart from any tokenized securities, under ADGM’s regulations, any crypto exchange that operates a spot or derivative market in relation to virtual assets (which include cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether) will have to apply for a Multilateral Trading Facility license,” the ADGM said. Companies that are likely to operate MTFs must pay an application fee of $125,000 and an annual supervision fee of $60,000. 

In Singapore, crypto exchanges that are not involved in fiat currencies usually apply for a Major Payments Institution license (for digital payment token service), which comes with a 10,000 Singapore dollar ($7,500) annual fee. Wherein, New York's BitLicense comes with a $5,000 application fee, although companies have reported bearing a cost of around $100,000 for time allocation, and legal and compliance fees. 

Dubai’s fees, on the other hand, are much more reasonable for larger companies. Although, it may not be very sustainable for startups, says Irina Heaver, a crypto lawyer based in the UAE. 

“However, I fully agree that Dubai needed to step up and to regulate the space, with so many bottom feeding scammers trying to establish here, enough is enough. Hopefully, these regulations will be used to really target those bad players,” Heaver said.  

According to the Norwegian National Authority of Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (Økokrim), this seizure is the largest-ever cryptocurrency-related money seizure ever made by Norway. 

"Økokrim are experts at following the money. This case shows that we are also good at following the money on the blockchain even though criminals use advanced techniques to avoid detection," says Marianne Bender, a senior public prosecutor. 

The firm added that that it would work in collaboration with Sky Mavis, owner of Axie Infinity game in order to get the funds back to its victims. 

Axie Infinity gives players the chance to win Ethereum. Its "flagship offering," according to Sky Mavis, is the "#1 game on Ethereum by daily, weekly, and monthly active players. 

Attackers who had access to five out of the nine private keys used by the transaction validators for Ronin Network, the Ethereum-based DeFi decentralized finance platform utilized by Sky Mavis, were able to steal $620 million in March 2022. The game, publisher describes its Ronin side chain as "a tool that allows game developers to deliver the benefits of blockchain to their players without any of the complications.

"Upon gaining access to the organization, the attackers approved cryptocurrency transactions and started promptly transferring the funds through the Ethereum-based cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, which is currently the target of US sanctions. In September 2022, around $30 million worth of illicit proceeds were discovered and seized by US officials. 

The FBI and Økokrim allegedly collaborated to recover an additional $5.9 million. "This is money that can be used to finance the North Korean regime and their nuclear weapons program. It has therefore been important to trace the cryptocurrency and try to stop the assets from being converted into regular currency," explained Bender. 

More Crypto Comeuppance 

Cryptocurrency thieves with ties to the Korean peninsula had a tough day on Thursday. The same day, Terraform Labs and its wanted fugitive chief, South Korean national Do Kwon, were accused of scamming investors by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

"We allege that Terraform and Do Kwon failed to provide the public with full, fair, and truthful disclosure as required for a host of crypto asset securities, most notably for LUNA and Terra USD[…]We also allege that they committed fraud by repeating false and misleading statements to build trust before causing devastating losses for investors," says SEC chairman Gary Gensler. 

Moreover, the collapse of Terraform Labs' TerraUSD “stablecoin” and linked “Luna” tokens sparked the so called “crypto winter.” Since the cryptocurrency's value was tied to the US dollar, the crash was portrayed as being impossibly unlikely. But, that was not the case, and as a result, a lot of investors lost a loads of money. 

Apparently, Kwon has fled with the last known address in Singapore. While, the city-state claims he left the island in September 2022. His passport was revoked by the South Korean government and he has since been added to Interpol's Red Notice list. 

While this is going on, Terraform Labs continues announcing new findings as if it had not nearly brought about the end of the world. With its TerraLuna ecosystem, it introduced a decentralized automation layer function yesterday.  

The libraries were discovered by software supply chain security firm Phylum, which said the ongoing activity is a continuation of a campaign that was first made public in November 2022. 

How Did Threat Actors Use Typosquatting? 

In an initial finding, it was discovered that popular packages including beautifulsoup, bitcoinlib, cryptofeed, matplotlib, pandas, pytorch, scikit-learn, scrapy, selenium, solana, and tensorflow were being mimicked via typosquatting. 

For each of the aforementioned, the threat actors deploy between 13 and 38 typosquatting variations in an effort to account for a wide variety of potential mistypes that could lead to the download of the malicious package. 

In order to evade detection, the malicious actors deployed a new obfuscation tactic that was not being utilized in the November 2022 wave. Instead, they are now using a random 16-bit combination of Chinese ideographs for function and variable identifiers. 

Researchers at Phylum emphasized that the code makes use of the built-in Python functions and a series of arithmetic operations for the string generation system. This way, even if the obfuscation produces a visually striking outcome, it is not extremely difficult to unravel. 

"While this obfuscation is interesting and builds up extremely complex and highly obfuscated looking code, from a dynamic standpoint, this is trivial[…]Python is an interpreted language, and the code must run. We simply have to evaluate these instances, and it reveals exactly what the code is doing,” reads a Phylum report. 

Malicious Browser Extensions 

For taking control of the cryptocurrency transactions, the malicious PyPi packages create a malicious Chromium browser extension in the ‘%AppData%\Extension’ folder, similar to the November 2022 attacks. 

It then looks for Windows shortcuts pertaining to Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Opera, followed by hijacking them to load the malevolent browser extension using the '--load-extension' command line argument. 

For example, a Google Chrome shortcut would be hijacked to "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --load-extension=%AppData%\\Extension". 

After the web browser is launched, the extension will load, and malicious JavaScript will monitor for cryptocurrency addresses copied to the Windows clipboard. When a crypto address is found, the browser extension will swap it out for a list of addresses that are hardcoded and under the control of the threat actor. By doing this, any sent cryptocurrency transaction funds will be sent to the wallet of the threat actor rather than the intended receiver. 

By including cryptocurrency addresses for Bitcoin, Ethereum, TRON, Binance Chain, Litecoin, Ripple, Dash, Bitcoin Cash, and Cosmos in this new campaign, the threat actor has increased the number of wallets that are supported. 

These findings illustrate the ever-emerging threats that developers face from supply chain attacks, with threat actors inclining to methods like typosquatting to scam users into installing fraudulent packages.  

AI Crypto: The next big thing 

AI crypto tokens will surely be the next big thing in the industry, an image of Metaverse mania, Defi boom, or meme coin explosion. 

ChatGPT and other AI-based technologies have been viral across social media and the business world. Will this make three altcoins stand-out winners in the next bull market?

Understanding AI Crypto: How trading narratives can bring profit

Narratives are important for incredible rallies or declines, does not matter if they are accurate or not. For instance, the last Bitcoin narrative was aggravated by its use as an inflation hedge. But when the inflation hedge surfaced, the top cryptocurrency was hit by one of its worst downtrends to date. 

Other latest narratives include Defi driving Ethereum and similar coins higher, or when Metaverse tokens rose rapidly after Mark Zuckerberg changed the parent company's name to Mera (earlier Facebook). 

NFTs also helped Ethereum and newbies like Solana. Elon Musk made meme coins go viral by just tweeting about it.

The one thing common in all these assets is that the narratives made money while being in markets, it is all that matters. For savvy cryptocurrency investors exploring the next big narrative, you don't have to look beyond two letters: AI.

AI Crypto and ChatGPT

OpenAI's ChatGPT is currently all over social media. The AI tool has already passed the Medical License Exam, Bar Exam, and MBA exam. People are using it to write articles, solve questions, and tweets, do homework, and perform tasks automatically. People are even using it for Bitcoin as various celebrities. The platform has shown sheer potential. 

Crypto AI Tokens on the edge of a new "Bull Cycle"

Although no AI crypto tokes share any resemblance with ChatGPT, projects with links with anything AI has recovered more significantly from cryptocurrency bear market lows.

For instance, Fetch.ai(FET), is up roughly 480% from its lows and is up over 200% in January 2023 itself. Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) is another great example, with a 230% recovery from lows and more than 100% year-to-date. SingularlyNet (AGIX) beats them both with a low put in three months before and more than 600% gains from the low. AGIX jumped over 460% during January 2023 with a full week still left. 

The results are surprising, but there's still a lot more to see. Jason Soni, Crypto and Currency Analyst at Elliott Wave International recently made a video on three AI-based crypto tokens that may be on the verge of a new bull cycle. 

The three cryptocurrencies analyzed in the video are AGIX, FET, and OCEAN. You can find Soni's analysis on Elliott Wave international's Crypto Trader's Classroom, which brings three new videos every week. The video explains where these altcoins are in their current market cycle and breaks down why there could be more upside in the future. 

According to internet sleuth ZachXBT, the funds were stolen from the Harmony blockchain bridge hack from last year, which led to a whopping $100 million crypto compromise. Apparently, the same hacker group utilized Tornado Cash, a now banned crypto mixer that conceals names of people involved in the transaction, in order to carry out the attack. 

As per the analysis, conducted by token movements, the ETH was routed through the anonymity system Railgun before being collected in wallets and sent to three significant crypto exchanges, possibly to be exchanged for fiat currency. 

“A very busy weekend” for Lazarus Group 

ZachXBT shared details of this week’s token movements on Twitter, claiming Lazarus Group has had “a very busy weekend” moving funds. 

In the follow-tweets, ZachXBT also linked to the website Chainabuse.com where he shared a list of approximately 350,000 unique wallet addresses that were involved in the Friday’s operation. 

Binance’s Say on the Issue 

On Monday, Binanace CEO Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ too, commented on the situation. CZ claims that the hackers used Huobi, a competing exchange, rather than Binance this time as one of their exchanges. The hacker's accounts were subsequently frozen with Binance's assistance, he says. 

CZ also disclosed that 124 BTC ($2.6m) had been seized from the hackers, indicating at least some of their ETH has been converted to BTC. 

“We detected Harmony One hacker fund movement. They previously tried to launder through Binance and we froze his accounts. This time he used Huobi. We assisted Huobi team to freeze his accounts. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered,” he wrote. 

Although, Huobi did not comment on the matter other than retweeting an article claiming that the exchange had frozen accounts containing money connected to the hack. 

According to a report from South Korea's National Intelligence Service from December of last year, North Korean hackers have stolen more than $1 billion in digital assets since 2017. 

Moreover, the report claims that around $626 million, or more than half of that estimated tally, was taken in 2022. It also stated that it is suspected that the North Korean government uses the money obtained from the theft to advance Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.  

Drug cartels are under attack by the DEA

The Binance versus the money laundering issue

According to the latest report by Interisle Counseling Gathering, illegal activities pertaining to cryptocurrencies have grown by 257% over the past year, with wallets and trades being the most vulnerable to attacks. 

Cybercriminals are experiencing exceptional results in their operations, by engaging in techniques similar to methods used in other online monetary crimes on virtual monetary forms. 

How is Cryptocurrency the Most Suitable for Cybercrime? 

The autonomous, anonymous and permanent attributes of crypto transactions make cryptocurrency ideal for cybercrime activities. 

Crypto has emerged as a highly-priced vehicle for threat actors for the following reasons: 

1. No Oversight: Fundamental authorities such as banks, or government agencies, which generally play the role of a middleman in financial transactions, do not intervene in crypto transactions. 

2. Anonymity of threat actors: Crypto transactions do not transmit any detail that could possibly disclose the hacker in any way, such as names, email addresses, or other background information. There is only one wallet address, which is a collection of otherwise cryptic letters and numbers. Additionally, hackers frequently use numerous wallets to further "wash" transactions. 

3. Transactions are permanent: In crypto, money being exchanged cannot be reversed. The transaction is out of an individual's hands, just like using cash. Additionally, hackers can easily flee the scene of cybercrime, like ransomware, without being detected. 

With the constant decline in the value of cryptocurrency, cybercriminals who have considerable expertise in ransomware attacks are compelled to reconsider how they collect their payoffs and the amount they could demand. 

The crypto crash has as well resulted in the bankruptcy of many online crypto-trade commercial centers, where cybercriminals apparently deal with their cash or payoffs. For an instance, last year, at least 30 more modest dim web trade centers went bankrupt, and later closed down. Hackers still retain the mentality of a conventional financial backer: if the value of a resource starts to decline, they usually cash out rapidly to limit their losses. 

Blockchain Paving Way for Advanced Network Protection: 

Blockchain technology emerged as a significant founding for Bitcoin over 10 years ago, while it was also largely compared to the cryptocurrencies at that time. However, advanced blockchain application, like Ethereum has become more widely popular, for it has newer market segments such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized, distributed-computing led finance platforms. 

This decentralized and consensus-oriented characteristic of Blockchain allows higher resilience to cyberattacks. In the presence of Blockchain, the threat actor will need to acquire control of the majority of nodes to alter ledger transactions, which is extremely difficult and costly, in order to be able to carry out a hack successfully. 

Moreover, a domain name server (DNS) that maps IP addresses to a website name can also be moved to a blockchain platform, dispersing resources across various nodes and making it more difficult for the hacker to access the data. Thus, making blockchain systems a technology that could be a game changer in combating future cybercrimes. 

Crypto and Cyber Skills Rules the Day

The new generation of tech experts is currently in the forefront to combat cybercrime, with their advanced skillsets and tools that operate a step ahead of threat actors. From becoming a Blockchain Developer, where one can master architectural principles of blockchain and develop apps in a corporate environment, to becoming a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), where you are trained to investigate vulnerabilities in target systems and utilize the same techniques as malicious hackers, one can procure great opportunities to combat cybercrimes in crypto.  

How can you protect your system and your funds from being compromised?