Bluenoroff is Kaspersky's name for a financially motivated unit within the broader Lazarus formation. Kaspersky introduced the designation publicly in 2017 while documenting bank intrusions connected to the 2016 Bangladesh Central Bank theft and other attacks on financial institutions and SWIFT-connected systems. The group used watering holes, backdoors, compromised infrastructure, and malware tailored to banking environments, with activity spanning multiple countries. By 2022, Kaspersky described a shift from banks and SWIFT servers toward cryptocurrency businesses as the group's principal source of illicit income. Operators created convincing cryptocurrency software companies and applications, delivered backdoored updates, and used malicious documents and social engineering to abuse trust. The reporting portrays Bluenoroff as able to draw on the larger formation's malware, exploits, and infrastructure while maintaining a distinct financial objective.
bZx
#bZx • 2021-11
🇺🇸 United States
bZx suffered a phishing-driven compromise after a developer received a malicious Word document, leading to theft of the developer private key and unauthorized ownership changes on affected smart contracts. The attacker used the new contract owner to drain approved tokens from bZx deployments on BSC and Polygon while the Ethereum deployment was reported unaffected, and later blockchain investigations tied the incident into a Lazarus/Bluenoroff-linked cryptocurrency laundering cluster.
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Related Reports
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Affected Countries
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57
Months Since
Related Actors
First seen: 2017-04 •
Last seen: 2026-07
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