August marked a worrying time for the industry as cybercriminals ransacked hundreds of millions of dollars.
With the number of hacks and scams rising tremendously this year, August marked another bad month in terms of the amounts lost to cybercriminals. August witnessed about $313 million scammed from crypto holders and platforms.
Blockchain security firm PeckShield shone a light on this, stating, “August 2024 witnessed 10+ hacks in the crypto space, resulting in ~$313.86 million in losses. The 2 largest hacks, both involving unauthorized transfers (#Phishing), accounted for 93.5% of the total stolen funds, amounting to $293.4 million.”
Source: PeckShield on X
One of those phishing attacks saw cybercriminals walk away with a whopping $238 million in BTC. The other stole $55.4 million in DAI. These attacks highlight the scale at which phishing is used to separate victims from their funds. In fact, a CertiK report noted that most of the funds lost to cybercriminals in the first half of this year were due to phishing scams, which wreaked havoc to the tune of $498 million.
The other notable attacks occurring this August involved the ones witnessed by Ronin and Nexera, with the former having $12 million exploited but returned by a white hat hacker. Nevertheless, it suffered a $5.1 million unauthorized transaction. The Nexera exploit led to about $1.5 million stolen from the protocol.
August Follows July’s Cybercrime Trend
As these hacks mark massive losses for industry participants in August, July was no better. The widely spoken WazirX hack occurred then, because of which it has requested Singapore’s Supreme Court for restructuring and moratorium. It lost $235 million as North Korean hackers exploited vulnerabilities in its cold storage, ransacking about 40% of its stored funds and preventing users from withdrawing their funds for the foreseeable future.
