Crypto Stealing has become a serious problem in today’s world which is rising day by day. But the month of December witnessed a significant decline in Crypto stealing.
In the previous few years, hackers have exploited vulnerabilities within these third parties, have targeted cryptocurrencies directly, and have employed flash loans to their benefit. To date, this has seen them rob the equivalent of nearly $9 billion.
However, as we all know, some cryptos have gone like a bat out of hell in value in recent years. This means if cyberpunks were to have kept all of the cryptos they robbed and cashed it in today, they’d have amounted to a fortune worth more than $46 billion.
Decline in December 2022
The December stats are much lesser than the month before, witnessing an 89.5% reduction from the $595 million worth of exploits across 36 main incidents recorded in November 2022, a figure largely skewed by the $477 million hack of crypto exchange FTX.
36 significant invasions were registered in November totaling a loss of ~$595 Million. As always, make sure a project has an audit & KYC before financing! Remember to always #DYOR and look over the audit reports!
Blockchain bridges were the main target, comprising 70% of all losses this year and the siphoning of almost $2 billion robbed from decentralized finance protocols. Cross-chain bridges became widespread as one of the primary ways to bind two blockchains, permitting users to shift tokens from one chain to another. But in order to do so, blockchain bridges have to temporarily hold the value of the transaction in each of the tokens involved, making them tempting to hackers.
Major Incidents
In the largest theft of the year, over half a billion dollars worth of ether and USD coin was looted from the Ronin Network, a blockchain that sponsors the non-fungible-token-based video game, Axie Infinity. According to Ronin, the hackers were able to hack nodes, the computers that process network transactions. The action went unrecognized until a user was unable to take out funds and filed a report. The U.S. Treasury Department later related the stealing to the North Korean state-backed hacking collective Lazarus Group.
In another incident, a cyberpunk attacked Poly Network by exploiting a vulnerability in its system and stealing reserves worth over $600 million. However, in a strange twist, they didn’t make off with their bounty. Instead, the hacker spoke to the platform and agreed to give back most of the money, except for $33 million of tether (USDT) which had been frozen by the issuers. But that wasn’t the end of the fiasco as $200 million of the stolen funds were entangled in an account that required a password from the hacker and Poly Network.
