Over $313 Million Stolen in August Crypto Hacks: Report

Key Takeaways

• The largest single incident involved a crypto whale losing 4,064 Bitcoin, valued at around $238 million, in a phishing attack on August 19. 
• The numbers mark an 18% increase in losses to fraudulent activities compared to July.

The cryptocurrency sector faced significant losses in August, with over $313.86 million stolen in more than 10 different hacks. According to blockchain security firm PeckShield, a staggering $293.4 million of that sum was attributed to phishing attacks. These numbers mark an 18% increase in losses to fraudulent activities compared to July.

The largest single incident involved a crypto whale losing 4,064 Bitcoin, valued at around $238 million, in a phishing attack on August 19. The stolen funds were quickly moved across various crypto platforms, including THORChain, KuCoin, and Railgun.

Another whale fell victim to a similar attack, losing over $55 million in the stablecoin Dai. The funds were initially held in the fourth-largest DeFi protocol, Maker, before being converted to Ethereum and moved out of the original address.

In a different type of incident, the Ronin Network experienced a malicious transaction involving 4,000 ETH, worth approximately $10 million, on August 6. However, the attack was carried out by whitehat hackers who exploited a Maximum Extractable Value bug. These ethical hackers returned the stolen funds and reported the vulnerability to Ronin Network’s developers, earning praise and potentially a $500,000 bug bounty reward.

Other notable hacks in August included an unauthorized transaction worth $5.1 million and an exploit of the decentralized finance protocol Nexera, which lost $1.8 million. In early August, Nexera was hacked for $1.5 million worth of Nexera (NXRA) tokens

A recent report by Immunefi, released on August 29, stated that the crypto industry has lost $1.21 billion in digital assets due to hacks and rug pulls so far in 2024. The report stated that the first eight months of 2024 saw more than 150 incidents of hacks and rug pulls.

Notably, in July, India’s WazirX crypto exchange suffered one of the year’s largest cyberattacks, losing $234.9 million from one of its multisig wallets. Almost $4.2 million users were affected by the hack.