Crypto hacking, fraud losses hit $29 million in December, lowest in 2024
Losses from crypto scams, exploits and hackers in the final months of 2024 recorded December as the least hacked month of the year.
Blockchain security firm Certike said in a December 31 post on X that there were $28.6 million in known losses to exploits, hacks and fraud in December, up from $63.8 million in November and $115.8 million in October.
According to the organization, exploits made up the bulk of the damage, with $26.7 million stolen by attackers in December.
The two most notable incidents were the $2.1 million exploit of decentralized finance (DeFi) platform GemPad, where an attacker exploited a vulnerability in the project's smart contracts to steal its assets.
In the year In the closing days of 2024, crypto losses due to hacking, exploitation and fraud have reached the lowest level of the year. Source: CertiK
The second most serious incident reported by CertK was when the hacker used the DeFi project's FEG token bridge, withdrawing FEG tokens from the bridge's contract without depositing them in the source chain, leaking $1 million.
According to Certke's analysis on December 31st, the cause of the vulnerability is a bug in the FEG crosschain message authentication process.
Blockchain security firm PecShield shared similar information in a January 1 post on X. Hack lost $24.7 million in December, down 71 percent from November.
Source: PeckShieldAlert
Of the more than 25 hacks recorded by PeckShield, the Dec. 16 and 17 exploit against users of password management service LastPass was the most significant, costing $12.3M, according to onchain data from Web3 sleuth Zachxbt.
LastPass was the victim of a data breach in December 2022, when hackers copied customer vault information from an encrypted storage.
As a result, more than $35 million worth of crypto has been stolen from 150 victims so far, according to user cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs in a September blog post.
Meanwhile, the December 2nd security breach of DeFi market protocol Yee Finance was the second largest reported by PeckShield in December, with around $2.2 million taken.
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In the Cyberspace 2024 Web3 Security Report shared with Cointelegraph on December 24, the onchain security firm said that $2.3 billion worth of crypto was stolen in 2024 on 165 occasions.
According to Syvers, this represents a 40 percent increase compared to 2023, when $1.69 billion worth of crypto was stolen by hackers.
However, it is 37% less than the $3.78 billion expected in 2022.
Dedi Lavid, co-founder and CEO of Syvers, told Cointelegraph that in 2016, The increase in 2024 may be due to the increase in access control violations, especially in central exchanges (CEXs) and crypto guards.
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