Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics company, recently reported that crypto firms lost $3.8 billion to hackers in 2022. They said it was the “biggest year ever” for crypto hacking. However, the most important insight in their report was that from the billions of dollars lost to con artists, over 82% of the amount was stolen from DeFi platforms. This shows how decentralized finance is still very vulnerable to attacks and how long way the path ahead is.
2022 was the largest year for crypto hackers
Chainalysis is working on Crypto Crime Report, and they published a small section of the same recently. It said that the largest year for crypto hacking was 2022 when cryptocurrency companies lost $3.8 billion. Compared to 2021, when crypto businesses lost $3.3 billion to hacks, it was approximately a 15% jump. However, if we compare these numbers with 2020, in 2022, we saw more than a 7x increase in crypto hacks.
Coming to the data shared by Chainalysis, it was seen that crypto hacking jumped during March 2022 and was at its peak in October 2022. October alone accounted for almost 20% of the total funds lost in the entire year at $775.7 million. This was spread over a total of 32 separate attacks.
DeFi is too vulnerable
Chainalysis data also showed that $3.1 billion of total funds lost were from decentralized finance platforms. This was a 73% jump from 2021 which is huge. Of these DeFi platforms, the most vulnerable were cross-chain bridges which accounted for 64% of the total hacks in 2021.
The biggest hacking group ever
The blockchain analysis company also reported that the largest hacking group in 2022 were North Korea. They stole an estimated $1.7 billion which is almost 50% of the total crypto stolen the entire year. Of this amount, $1.1 billion were again stolen from DeFi platforms which made the entire trend of DeFi hacks intense. Their report also shows that North Korean hackers used a lot of mixing services to launder large sums of money. Tornado Cash was one of the most used services by them. It was also one of the reasons why the United States banned the use of the platform. It also brought trouble to the founder of the open-source tool.
What are your thoughts as crypto firms lost $3.8 billion to hackers in 2022? And do you think this number will only go up from here on? Let us know in the comments below. And, if you found our content informative, do share it with your family and friends.
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