Today in Crypto: deBridge attack blamed on N. Korea

DeBridge Finance, a cross-chain protocol that fell victim to an email-based cyber attack, said the attack likely came from North Korea’s Lazarus Group, Coindesk wrote on Friday (August 5).

The attack came from an email address impersonating that of Alex Smirnov, the deBridge co-founder.

Many employees reported the suspicious email, even though one of them downloaded and opened the file from the email.

Coindesk wrote that there was an investigation that showed a similar attack vector to others committed by Lazarus, according to Smirnov.

Meanwhile, investors in digital assets are trying to gauge whether the worst of the turbulence may be over, Bloomberg wrote on Sunday (August 7).

Stocks have rallied in recent weeks, and bitcoin is up 15% in the past month.

The 90-day correlation between bitcoin and the S&P 500 weakened slightly in June, but is now back at around 0.65, one of the higher numbers in Bloomberg data since 2010.

According to Bloomberg analyst Mike McGlone, cryptocurrencies are poised to outperform “if stocks have bottomed,” adding that there are “few more powerful” forces than when the stock market falls at a high rate in the first half of the year.

In other news, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, said that there will likely be no problems with the transition to the blockchain, even if some miners switch to alternative chains of coin tokens, Bloomberg wrote on Saturday (August 6).

“I don’t expect Ethereum to really be significantly damaged by another fork,” Buterin said in a webinar. “In general, my impression from pretty much everyone I talk to in the Ethereum ecosystem, they’ve been completely supportive of the proof-of-stake effort, and the ecosystem has been pretty united around it.”

The major software transition, called Merge, which will cut down on extensive energy use. Ethereum will switch from proof-of-work – which requires miners with banks of powerful computers to order transactions – to proof-of-stake – using energy-efficient coin wallets and validators for transactions.

Finally, India’s Financial Crimes Bureau has frozen the assets of WazirX, which came as it investigated violations of foreign exchange rules, Reuters reported on Friday.

WazirX’s assets were linked to Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.

A WazirX spokesperson said the company was cooperating but did not agree with the agency’s allegations.

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