(Commonwealth Union) _With two weeks remaining in the month and losses totalling over $718 million, October has surpassed all previous records for crypto-related crimes. The sum was taken from several decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols over 11 different attacks, according to data cited by Chainalysis on Thursday.
According to Chainalysis experts, this year “will probably surpass 2021 as the largest year for hacking on record.” They said: “Over $3 billion has been made by hackers to date across 125 hacks.”
According to Jasper Lee, audit tech lead at crypto auditing company Sooho.io, “despite the present bear market, we’re witnessing a lot of activity from hackers who are targeting multiple protocols.”
Insecure protocols are easy prey for hackers since they are too readily accessed and locked, therefore they provide rapid and reliable short-term profit for protocols or dapps (decentralized apps) that have not undergone comprehensive auditing.
Attackers earned more than $3.2 billion in 2021. A $625 million attack on Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge, a $200 million Nomad bridge exploit, and eventually a $325 million Wormhole weakness made 2022’s start even worse.
Attack methods in the cryptocurrency industry range from market manipulation, in which rogue traders use millions of dollars to sway thinly traded markets in their favour to make multiples of the initial capital invested, to the exploitation of bridges, a blockchain-based tool that lets users transact between various networks.
Chainalysis reports that this month alone, more than three bridges had been breached. Over the weekend, an attack on a BNB Chain-based bridge led to exploiters making over $100 million without permission after the bridge had been used to steal $566 million. Then, on Monday, the layer 1 blockchain QANplatform was the subject of a bridge breach that led to the theft of about $1 million worth of QANX tokens.
