Cryptocurrency hackers and exploiters appear to be slowing for the 2022 holidays as $62.2 million worth of cryptocurrencies were stolen in December, the “lowest monthly tally” of the year, according to CertiK.
The blockchain security firm tweeted a list of the month’s most significant attacks on Dec. 31. It highlighted the $15.5 million in exit scams as the method that stole the most value over the month, followed by the $7.6 million in flash-credit-based exploits. Dollar.
#CertiKStatsAlert
Summarizing all incidents in December, we confirmed that ~$62.2 million was lost through exploits, hacks, and fraud.
The lowest monthly value this year.
Exit fraud amounted to ~$15.5 million
Flash loans totaled ~$7.6 million
See the details below pic.twitter.com/1ub3mYVv6K
— CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) December 31, 2022
A later tweet on January 1st confirmed that the top 23 exploits accounted for around 98.5% of the $62.2 million, with the $15 million Helio protocol incident on December 2nd the was the biggest of the month.
The protocol that manages the stablecoin HAY (HAY) suffered a loss when a trader took advantage of a price discrepancy on Ankr Reward Bearing Stakes BNB (aBNBc) to borrow millions worth of HAY.
Back then, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Ankr suffered a separate exploit where an attacker minted 20 trillion aBNBc, causing its price to plummet. The Helio trader quickly deposited aBNBc tokens to borrow 16 million HAY, resulting in the loan being significantly undercollateralized, resulting in the loss of the protocol and a depegging of its stablecoin.
The second largest incident of the month was the $12.9 million exploits of Defrost Finance’s v1 and v2 logs on December 23, in which an attacker staged a flash loan attack using a fake collateral token and added a malicious price oracle to liquidate the protocol.
Days after the exploit, the hacker returned the funds stolen from the v1 protocol to an address controlled by Defrost, although the v2 hack funds have not yet been returned.
CertiK labeled the exploit an “exit scam” because an administrator key was required to carry out the attack. Defrost denied the allegations to Cointelegraph, claiming the key was compromised.
Related: Crypto recovery requires more aggressive anti-fraud solutions
The December number is much lower than the previous month, recording an 89.5% decrease from the $595 million worth of exploits across 36 major incidents CertiK recorded in November, a number broken by the 477 million -Dollar hack of the crypto exchange FTX was heavily distorted.
#CertiKStatsAlert
In November, 36 major attacks were registered with a total damage of around 595 million US dollars.
As always, make sure a project has an Audit & KYC before investing!
Remember to always #DYOR and read the audit reports! pic.twitter.com/UhiDU2itAm
— CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) December 1, 2022
Overall, in 2022 alone, the year’s top 10 exploits funneled around $2.1 billion to bad actors, mostly via cross-blockchain bridges and DeFi protocols.
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