Crypto hackers stole $182,5 million in 30 attacks in a month

What’s new? In January, crypto hackers conducted over 30 attacks and stole digital assets worth $182,54 million, up 771% year-on-year ($20,95 million), experts at blockchain audit firm PeckShield reported. The biggest incident was the $112,5 million hack of XRP wallets of Ripple fintech company senior executive Chris Larsen on the last day of the month.

Источник: Twitter.com

What else is known? The day before, a blockchain researcher under the nickname ZachXBT claimed that the Ripple payment protocol was hacked and 213 million native tokens XRP were withdrawn. According to him, the stolen funds were laundered through MEXC, Gate, Binance, Kraken, OKX, HTX, and HitBTC exchanges. In response, Chris Larsen clarified that only his personal accounts, not related to the company, were attacked and Ripple notified the exchanges to freeze the funds and involved law enforcers in the investigation.

Источник: Twitter.com

The hack of Larsen’s accounts took the top spot by a significant margin: the damage exceeded the total losses from the other hacks in the top ten by almost double. Thus, the second place is occupied by the hack of the South Korean Web 3.0 music platform Somesing ($11,58 million), followed by the theft of reserves of the GMEE token development team ($10 million).

The payment system Coinspaid is next, as a result of the hack it lost $7,5 million. The incident was the second for it in six months: in July, hackers had already withdrawn $37 million. Another $7 million was lost as a result of the theft of Wall Street Memes tokens, which was the fifth-largest incident. Subsequently, the hacker started selling off the asset, which led to the collapse of its exchange rate.

Behind it come the DeFi protocols Abracadabra, Gamma, Radiant, and Socket with losses of $6,5 / $6,18 / $4,5 / $3,3 million respectively. Rounding out the top ten are phishing attacks with a total loss of $3,03 million.

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Earlier, PeckShield reported that in 2023, the damage from more than 600 attacks on crypto projects amounted to $2,61 billion, of which $1,51 billion accounted for hacks, and $1,1 billion for fraud. The overall figure dropped by 27,78% year-over-year, with 674,9 million in assets recovered. DeFi protocols remain the top target, accounting for 67% of the damage.