September 2023 has now emerged as the most loss-making month of the year for crypto-related security breaches as a staggering $329.8 million in cryptocurrency has been stolen.
As of October 2 2023, the blockchain security company, CertiK, reported that the major contributor to the total crypto theft in September 2023 was the attack on the Mixin Network. During this incident, the Hong Kong-based decentralized cross-chain transfer protocol suffered a breach of its cloud service provider resulting in a loss of $200 million.
#CertiKStatsAlert 🚨
Combining all the incidents in September we’ve confirmed ~$332M lost to exploits, hacks and scams.
Exit scams were ~$1.9M
Flash loans were ~$0.4M
Exploits were ~$329.8M
See more details below 👇 pic.twitter.com/DMFN9LWU8V
— CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) September 30, 2023
During the same month, other significant incidents included attacks on the CoinEx exchange and Stake.com, leading to losses of $53 million and $41 million, respectively.
The Lazarus Group, a hacking collective associated with North Korea, has been identified as responsible for both of these attacks. According to recent data from Dune Analytics, the Lazarus Group presently possesses approximately $45.6 million in cryptocurrency assets.
These attacks pushed the total amount of cryptocurrency lost to exploits for the year to $925.4 million. The second-highest month for exploit losses in 2023 was July, during which $285.8 million was stolen.
Additionally, in the same month, there were other forms of cryptocurrency-related losses, as reported by CertiK. These included:
- $1.9 million lost due to exit scams
- $400,000 lost in flash loan attacks, and
- An additional $25 million lost to phishing attacks
The cumulative losses in 2023 attributed to exploits, scams, and hacks have now reached a staggering total of $1.34 billion.
Acccording to CertiK, in 2022, $1 billion was lost through scams, hacks, and exploits by March of 2022 largely due to the Ronin Bridge exploit in which North Korean hackers stole approximately $624 million. However, in 2023, it has taken until September, with the private key compromise of Stake.com wallets to surpass $1 billion lost to hacks, scams and exploits.
“The two largest incidents in 2022, Ronin and FTX (approximately $477 million) were enough to cover $1 billion in losses between them. In contrast, it has taken 8 months to see similar losses in 2023 and a combined total 571 incidents to surpass $1 billion,” the security firm said in a recent blog post.
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