Hackers have stolen $3 billion in crypto this year so far
The spectral entities of global hackers have been haunting DeFi projects throughout the month of October, so much so that we’re not even halfway through the month and yet the “Spooky Season” has turned out to be the biggest month of hacking activity this year, according to a report from Chainalysis.
The crypto research firm said late Wednesday that after four major hacks that took place on Tuesday, October $718 million has been stolen from decentralized finance projects over 11 hacks in just 11 days. One of those hacks was the QANX bridge, which disclosed it on Tuesday had been compromisedallowing hackers to pay out $1.16 million.
These October hacks include the $586 million hack Binance Bridge, the $2.3 million Temple DAO hack, and the $117 million Mango Markets hack on October 11, just to name a few. The recent hack used two different addresses to manipulate Mango’s native currency $MNGO’s price, then borrow against their own crypto as collateral, according to a post mortem by crypto security firm CertiK. The hacker in this case then went online to Mango’s forum and suggested that he would kindly return that crypto if they gave him some USD stablecoin worth $70 million from Mango’s treasury.
And as much as blockchain proponents continue to hype the secure nature of a consistent and immutable chain of data, cross-chain bridges remain a prime target for hacks. Bridges act as ways to transfer crypto between two different blockchains, and Chainalysis notes that three bridges were hacked this month in totalwith crypto worth nearly $600 million.
The number of hacks had actually calmed down somewhat during the summer months, with Chainalysis notes back in August that hacks appeared to be stalling along with ongoing battles with the crypto market. Since the crypto crash in May the worlds most popular coins, including bitcoin and ether, have yet to recover the wealth lost from the 2021 boom. Those watching bitcoin prices have noticed some big drops going into this week pending a US jobs report this Friday as well latest inflation reports.
The report from Chainalysis further notes 2022 is becoming biggest year for hackers only in terms of the amount of total money stolen from the wide range of crypto and NFT projects. Hackers have raised more than $3 billion so far this year across 125 hacks. This puts hackers on pace to beat 2021’s record of around $3.25 billion stolen in hacks by the end of the year.
What is also interesting is where the majority of these hacks are coming from this year. In previous years such as 2019 and 2020, a majority of hackers attacked crypto exchanges, mostly through accessing user accounts with account keys obtained through phishing or breaking into the exchange’s internal network. In 2021, hackers mostly targeted DeFi projects, which is an umbrella term for public crypto projects meant to remove middlemen and act as a currency exchange and payment method without oversight from either banks or regulators. Things have gotten so bad for these DeFi projects The FBI has taken note how dangerous it is for common people who are thinking of investing their hard earned crypto.
And as there are always more crypto hypemen pushing new decentralized autonomous organizations (AKA DAO) or the next big “hot wallet” application that allows users to use apps to manage crypto, it seems like every day there’s a new hack that shows how you never know what project will be next to have your user’s crypto stolen.
