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LayerZero Ties $292M KelpDAO Hack to North Korea's Lazarus Group

LayerZero said the attackers used a single-verifier setup to forge cross-chain messages, and the stolen rsETH later triggered freezes at Aave, SparkLend and Fluid.

  • LayerZero Labs attributed the $290 million Kelp DAO exploit to the protocol's security configuration, stating "KelpDAO chose to utilize a 1/1 DVN configuration" despite previous warnings against single-verifier setups.
  • Attackers, whom LayerZero attributed with preliminary confidence to North Korea's Lazarus Group, compromised two RPC nodes and deployed a DDoS attack to force a failover to poisoned infrastructure.
  • Once the failover triggered, Kelp's bridge released 116,500 rsETH to the attackers; malicious software then self-destructed, wiping local logs to conceal the manipulation of infrastructure RPCs.
  • The LayerZero Labs verifier is back online, and the company will no longer sign messages for any application running a 1-of-1 configuration, forcing a protocol-wide migration.
  • Lazarus Group has been linked to both the Drift Protocol exploit and Kelp, meaning the North Korean unit has drained more than $575 million from DeFi in 18 days through two structurally different attack vectors.
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North Korean hackers blamed for $290M crypto theft

The hack against Kelp DAO is the largest crypto heist of the year so far.

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TokenPost broke the news on Saturday, April 18, 2026.
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