Mixer Tornado Cash joins sanctions against North Korean hackers

 

Mixer Tornado Cash joins sanctions against North Korean hackers
    Now authorized addresses will not be able to work with its interface
    But this does not prevent them from conducting smart contracts.

Tornado Cash began to block access to the interface for addresses that fell under OFAC sanctions. The team announced this on their official Twitter account:

“To maintain financial confidentiality means to preserve our freedom. But this should not come at the expense of non-compliance with laws.”

The tweet includes an Etherscan link to the Chainalysis contract. She confirms that as of March 10, three addresses have been added to the list.

Tornado Cash released its ad the day after the North Korean band Lazarus scandal. The US Treasury has figured out that these hackers are behind the $600 million Ronin hack.

To cover their tracks, the attackers used the Tornado Cash mixer. They spent 28,000 ETH through this service.

The Ministry of Finance clarified that the criminals were withdrawing funds through the Ethereum address 0x098B716B8Aaf21512996dC57EB0615e2383E2f96, so it is now on the sanctions list.

Later, Chainalysis published their tweet - they noted that they also block this wallet for their products.
Blocking won't help.

Some users have criticized Tornado Cash's move for being pointless. After all, authorized addresses will not get access only to the dapp interface. In fact, hackers can continue to use smart contracts. In addition, nothing prevents them from simply sending the crypt to other addresses that are not subject to sanctions. This is confirmed by Roman Storm, co-founder of the service.
Nothing prevents you from resetting a sub-sanctioned address to a new one and immediately passing it through TornadoCash. The list is managed by Chainalysis and they just forward what the state sanctioned.
Roman Storm
co-founder of Tornado Cash 

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