Ethereum Defi projects still a favorite target for hackers, but stolen funds drop 28% in May: Immunefi

Hackers failed to exploit any major centralized entity in May, with DeFi protocols reducing losses from hacking and spoofing, according to a report from Bug Bounty Platform Immunefi.

In May, $52.4 million was stolen from DeFi investors through hacking and fraud. This represents a 12 percent decrease from the same period last year. Moreover, it is a significant decrease of 28% since April of this year.

In total, there were 21 instances where investors lost money across all chains monitored by Immunefi. Ethereum was the most targeted blockchain, followed by BNB Chain. The networks saw 9 and 4 events respectively.

Moreover, when the fraud involved 7 incidents, the financial loss reached 1.8 million dollars. That's a small loss compared to the $50.6 million lost to hackers.

According to the report, most of the losses in May were due to the $240 million theft of Gala Games and Sony Finance for $20 million.

Notably, Gala Games was able to obtain $22 million worth of ETH from the exploiter, but not before selling 600,000 GALA tokens on Uniswap.

In a blog post, Gala Games revealed that they used the money they earned to buy back and burn exploit-generated GALA tokens. Since the proceeds did not completely offset the amount of tokens the hackers were able to sell, the team had to burn more tokens, the remaining tokens that went into circulation were burned using tokens from the GALA wallet.

Later, the group announced that it has found the identity of the exploiter and is working with law enforcement to take appropriate legal action.

Earlier this week, Ryan Salame, formerly of FTX, was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison for defrauding FTX customers.

On April 18, Avraham Eisenberg, the man behind the $110 million mango market exploit, was indicted on all counts of commodity fraud, commodity fraud and wire fraud.

The reduction in losses caused by malicious actors is an encouraging sign that the days of the wild west of crypto may be over, with strict legal action playing a key role in recent developments.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.