KEY POINTS
- A single victim lost over $55 million worth of DAI tokens to a phishing attack
- One of August's top incidents was the breach of the Ronin network
- A Bitcoin whale lost $238 million to a 'suspicious transfer,' and has only recovered $205K
Security incidents were rampant in the cryptocurrency space last month, a new blockchain security report revealed, with losses estimated to have reached a staggering $316 million. Of the said losses, only $13.58 million was recovered.
The attacks last month ranged from account-related compromises, frontend breaches, contract vulnerabilities, and a popular method that many exploiters have benefited from over the years: phishing, as per blockchain security firm SlowMist.
Phishing Victims Top 9K
The August security report from SlowMist published Monday revealed that there were 9,145 victims of phishing scams in the crypto industry last month, citing data from Web3 anti-fraud platform Scam Sniffer.
A single victim lost $55.43 million worth of DAI tokens after the user signed a phishing transaction that targeted their DeFi Saver Proxy. Analysis from anti-money laundering tracking system MistTrack later showed that most of the stolen tokens were later swapped for Ether (ETH).
~$55M $DAI sent to various address but some consolidated again at 0x8cc568f3565a7ed44b3b0af8765a7ef67b8bc2dc.
— MistTrack🕵️ (@MistTrack_io) August 21, 2024
Most were later swapped for ETH.
Current Holdings:
0xdd6397104d57533e507bd571ac88c4b24852bce9 - 6745.88 ETH & ~$19.27M DAI 0x77b9f7e33e42b1f64b915bb27e9a9bca199da83e-… https://t.co/uCBjBbFDgi pic.twitter.com/nMuRzc7myO
SlowMist noted that most of the phishing attacks in August took place on Discord. It also reiterated that hackers have notably been targeting well-known blockchain projects in recent years.
Top Exploits in August
Among the top security incidents analyzed by SlowMist was the hacking of the Ronin Network, wherein the gaming blockchain network suffered abnormal withdrawals of cross-chain assets on its Ronin Bridge project.
The Ronin case is particularly interesting as the hackers returned the entire $12 million in pilfered Ether and USD Coin (USDC) tokens. The gaming blockchain revealed that it was informed by "white hats" about the security breach, resulting in the bridge being paused temporarily.
There was much clamor over the matter as some crypto users and Ronin gamers questioned why the white hat hacker wanted to "negotiate" at first instead of just returning the funds. The white hat was given a $500,000 bounty, as per SlowMist.
Another top incident in the past month was the "suspicious transfer" of a whopping 4,064 Bitcoin (worth some $238 million at the time) as first detected by prominent crypto sleuth ZachXBT, who revealed that the stolen funds were immediately moved to various crypto platforms, including ThorChain. ZachXBT later said that $205,000 has been returned to the victim.
Seven hours ago a suspicious transfer was made from a potential victim for 4064 BTC ($238M)
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) August 19, 2024
Transaction hash
4b277ba298830ea538086114803b9487558bb093b5083e383e94db687fbe9090
Funds were quickly transferred to ThorChain, eXch, Kucoin, ChangeNow, Railgun, Avalanche Bridge.
Crypto Losses Still Significantly High
The losses in August are much higher than what the crypto industry lost in July, wherein some $266 million were lost to exploits and scams. On the other hand, July was a significant month for the sector due to the much-followed $230 million exploit of Indian crypto exchange giant WazirX.
Akshay Nassa, founder of 100% encrypted decentralized exchange Chimp Exchange, said at the time that the security situation in the industry only proves how exploiters are evolving their ways as much as crypto firms are working to improve their security measures.
