Facing the Dark Forest: The Top 10 Web3 Thefts of 2023

Author: web3中文

The good news is: the value of crypto assets lost due to hacking attacks fell by more than 50% in 2023, to $1.7 billion .

The bad news: This is still a very large number, and the frequency of attacks (160 major hacks) is about the same as in 2022.

The hacker's "harvest" is smaller

Ari Redbord, director of global policy and government affairs at TRM Labs, who provided data to DL News The smaller gains for cybercriminals "may be due to law enforcement actions and better compliance controls rather than a downturn in the crypto market," he said.

According to data from DefiLlama, despite increased efforts to combat hackers, security issues caused by encryption vulnerabilities continued until the end of the year. OKX DEX on December 13, 2023 was attacked on 2018-01-06, resulting in losses of approximately US$2.7 million.

Since last September’s $43 million Stake hack, we published the list of hackers, and there have been five more major hacks. , they were large enough to push the Stake.com hack from 5th to 10th place.

Read on to see the 10 biggest cryptocurrency hacks of 2023 (note: the months mentioned below are all in 2023).

1. Mixin Network: US$200 million

9 In March, hackers stole $200 million from user accounts of Hong Kong exchange Mixin.

After the attack, DL News reported on the review of several industry insiders who found the attack suspicious, in part because Mixin lacked a cold wallet to secure Security of client funds.

Mixin founder Feng Xiaodong promised to compensate customers for half of their losses. Deposits and withdrawals of some tokens have resumed, but Mixin’s compensation plan is still unclear.

2.Euler Finance: $197 million

Lending The protocol Euler Finance was attacked in March and nearly $197 million was stolen by attackers who exploited a vulnerability in Euler's donation function contract but have since returned most of the stolen funds.

3.Multichain: US$126 million

Cross-chain Bridge protocol Multichain suffered a hack in July when the project's private keys were leaked. At the time, crypto research firm Chainalysis called it "one of the largest cryptocurrency hacks ever."

4.Poloniex: $126 million

November , hackers stole $126 million from cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex, and withdrawals were frozen after the funds were stolen.

According to DL News, the actual owner of Poloniex, Justin Sun, plans to provide victims with an "epic airdrop" of tokens as a defense against hacker attacks. compensate.

Poloniex resumed deposit and withdrawal services for multiple assets on December 5.

5. Atomic Wallet: $100 million

6 In March, Atomic Wallet users were hacked, resulting in $100 million in losses.

Analysts blamed the hackers on the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group, and angry investors filed a class-action lawsuit against Atomic Wallet following the attack.

6. Heco Chain: US$87 million

Similar In the case of the Poloniex hack in November, hackers attacked the hot wallet on the Heco chain.

Due to its relationship with HTX, which itself lost $12 million in a hacker attack, HTX investor Justin Sun included Heco Chain in his investment Compensation pledge for hacker attack victims.

7. Curve Finance: $62 million

DeFi The protocol Curve Finance was hit multiple times, with hackers stealing nearly $62 million from multiple trading pools.

The hack began with an initial vulnerability that allowed several seemingly unconnected hackers to steal information from multiple Curve trading pools.

8.CoinEx: $55 million

September Hackers hit CoinEx for $55 million, and the exchange said it experienced "abnormal withdrawals" on its platform.

CoinEx froze withdrawals for weeks and promised to compensate customers. The exchange later blamed the hack on a leak of private keys that gave attackers access to its hot wallets.

9. KyberSwap Elastic: $48 million

11 While hackers at HTX and Poloniex were attacking last month, an attacker conducted an unusually complex hack against multi-chain aggregator KyberSwap Elastic.

The attacker then issued a frantic ultimatum on the Etherscan block explorer demanding control of the protocol.

10.Stake.com: $41 million

Online crypto casino and sports betting platform Stake.com was hacked in September. "The loss of funds was by no means insignificant, but the attack did not have a significant impact on Stake's operations," co-founder Edward Craven said. Edward Craven said after the attack.

The FBI later blamed the attack on Lazarus, a cybercrime group linked to North Korea.