Computer hackers have stolen billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency for another year. However, according to crypto security businesses, the trend is going in the other direction for the first time since 2020.
According to De.FI, the web3 security company that manages the REKT database, hackers stole around two billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency using hundreds of different intrusions and thefts this year. From the breach of the Ronin network in 2022, in which hackers stole more than $600 million in cryptocurrency in what is considered to be the most significant event in the history of cryptocurrency, to the hack against Mixin Network this year, which earned the criminals almost $200 million, the website rates the worst crypto thefts that have ever occurred by comparing them to one another.
“This amount, though dispersed across various incidents, underscores the persistent vulnerabilities and challenges within the DeFi ecosystem,” DeFi stated in its report, which the company shared with TechCrunch. “Persistent vulnerabilities and challenges plague the DeFi ecosystem.” The year 2023 served as a monument to both the continued vulnerabilities and the progress achieved in resolving them, even though interest in the field was somewhat subdued due to the continuous lousy market in the first half of the year.
In December, the blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs also published an estimate of the total number of cryptocurrency hackers who have been stolen in the current year. The corporation reported that the entire amount had reached around $1.7 billion as of the middle of December.
The attack against Euler Finance, in which hackers stole approximately $200 million, is one of the other biggest crypto thefts of the year. Other notable hacks throughout the year include those against Multichain ($126 million), BonqDAO ($120 million), Poloniex ($114 million), and Atomic Wallet ($100 million), among hundreds of other companies.
According to research from Chainalysis, a company that monitors blockchain technology, thieves have stolen nearly $3.8 billion of cryptocurrency. As part of an endeavor to fund the regime’s sanctioned nuclear weapons program, hackers working for the North Korean government known as the Lazarus gang stole $1.7 billion of those funds. This gang is one of the most prolific groups of crypto criminals.
According to the research that Chainalysis published the previous year, “it is not an overstatement to say that cryptocurrency hacking constitutes a sizeable portion of the economy of the nation.”
According to Chainalysis, hackers stole $3.3 billion in 2021, the year leading up to the current year. Attempting to forecast what will take place in the year 2024 is impossible. We can anticipate that hackers will continue to attack the expanding business because of the inadequate security measures that are adopted by a large number of crypto and web3 companies, as well as the enormous amount of monetary worth that these projects possess, as was mentioned earlier this year at TechCrunch Disrupt.
