The amount of cryptocurrencies lost to hackers and phishing attacks significantly increased in August while the market wandered in uncertainty.
According to an X post by blockchain security firm PeckShield, the crypto ecosystem lost $313.86 million in over 10 different hacks last month. Of this tally, over $293 million was lost to phishing attacks.
#PeckShieldAlert August 2024 witnessed 10+ hacks in the crypto space, resulting in ~$313.86 million in losses. The 2 largest hacks, both involving unauthorized transfers (#Phishing), accounted for 93.5% of the total stolen funds, amounting to $293.4 million.#Top 5 Hacks in… pic.twitter.com/lIAieHdUqt
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) September 1, 2024
This shows an 18% increase in crypto assets lost to fraudulent actors since July. Per a crypto.news report, crypto and decentralized finance companies lost $266 million to hackers with a total of 16 events.
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Hackers hunting whales
The largest hack belongs to a whale that lost 4,064 Bitcoin (BTC), worth roughly $238 million, to a phishing attack on Aug. 19. The attacker soon moved the funds to various crypto platforms including THORChain, KuCoin and Railgun.
Quite similarly, another whale lost over $55 million in Dai (DAI) stablecoin to a phishing attack. Data shows that the funds were stored in the fourth-largest DeFi protocol Maker.
Per on-chain data, the hacker has swapped the funds to Ethereum (ETH) and currently doesn’t have any assets left in the address used for the attack.
On Aug. 6, Ronin Network saw a malicious 4,000 ETH transaction, worth $10 million. Luckily, the attack wasn’t engineered by fraudulent actors, instead, whitehat hackers exploited a Maximum Extractable Value bug.
The hackers soon returned the funds and pointed out the bug to Ronin Network’s developers. Subsequently, the company hinted at a $500,000 reward for the whitehat hackers as a bug bounty.
Another unauthorized transaction worth $5.1 million and Nexera’s $1.8 million exploit secured the fourth and fifth spots among the largest hacks in August, per PeckShield.
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