Crypto infrastructure company blames $290 million theft on North Korean hackers

A nearly $290 million cryptocurrency theft has been linked to North Korea’s TraderTraitor (a Lazarus-affiliated group). The adversary exploited a single-DAO verifier configuration in LayerZero’s infrastructure to mint fake rsETH, used the counterfeit tokens as collateral to borrow real Ether and stablecoins across platforms (including Kelp and Aave), and impeded defenses via DDoS and compromises of verification infrastructure; LayerZero’s post-mortem blames reliance on a single Decentralized Verifier Network (DVN) and warns integrators to adopt multi-DVN redundancy while law enforcement investigates.