Q3 Sees Lowest Crypto Hacks in 3 Years, But $440M Is Lost Forever

In Q3 2024, the number of hacks fell to the lowest level in three years, with only 28 cases, a total of $463.6 million was stolen.

However, the overall outlook is worrisome as there is no chance of recovering more than $440 million of the stolen funds.

The worst recovery rates ever

According to a recent report by cyber security firm Hacken with CryptoPotato, a staggering 95% of stolen funds are lost forever. This is in stark contrast to previous quarters when 50-60% of stolen assets were either blocked or recovered.

As such, this large amount of unaccounted money underscores the importance of robust post-event response strategies.

“This is the worst quarter in recent memory in terms of recovered or frozen funds. Among the victims, only three projects were able to recover their lost assets. We were hoping that the trend of percentage recovery of siphoned funds, which has been typical in previous quarters, would continue – but alas!

Analyzing losses by region, Asia had the highest amount this quarter, with a loss of $264 million. Australia followed with $43.3 million, Europe reported $22.16 million, and North America lost $15 million over the same period.

The most damaging type of attack occurs when a malicious actor takes control of tokens or functions, allowing them to withdraw money from wallets or smart contracts at will. After eight incidents and $316 million in thefts in Q3, access control breaches accounted for twice as many types of attacks compared to assets lost.

Next comes the reentrant attack, which is considered one of the most durable methods for extracting assets from a protocol. This involves an attacker using a loop to repeatedly withdraw funds from the smart contract checkout function. This attack is particularly harmful to protocols with liquid pools.

Although there were only three rollback attacks this quarter, they caused more than $33 million in losses across multiple assets.

Growing concerns

Although traditional carpet crawling has declined, meme coin launches on platforms such as Base, Tron, and Solana have increased. On Solana's meme coin platform, pump.fun, more than 2 million coins have recently been marketed, but only 89 have achieved a market cap of $1 million.

According to Hacken, this indicates that many remote pull scammers are moving to these platforms and creating low-value coins that look like remote pull schemes without showing legitimate activity.