Breaking down stats as crypto witnesses 93% YoY decline on exploits

• According to research, cryptocurrency hacks caused $8.8 million in damages in January.
• When compared to the $121.4 million in exploitable losses in January 2022, January’s data indicated a 92.7% drop.

In addition to the bullish cryptocurrency market rebound in January 2023, there have been other encouraging industry reports. This included a decrease in exploit-related losses this month compared to the same period last year.

Crypto attacks cost $8.8 million in damages in January, according to blockchain security company PeckShield.

Over the month, there were 24 exploits. Hackers transferred $2.6 million worth of cryptocurrency to mixers like Tornado Cash. 1,200 Ether [ETH] and about 2,668 Binance Coin [BNB] were in the breakdown of the assets supplied to mixers.

The January numbers represent a 92.7% decrease from the $121.4 million in exploited losses in January 2022.

Notable crypto exploits

The DeFi loan and borrowing site LendHub was the target of the largest exploit last month, according to PeckShield, accounting for 68% of the total loss of $6 million.

Other notable exploits for the month included the loss of $580,000 at Thoreum Finance and the $650,000 flash loan attack on Midas Capital. According to PeckShield, the January figure is also a 68% decrease from December 2022, when exploit losses totaled around $27.3 million.

According to DeFiYield’s Rekt database, there were further losses not shown in the statistics, including a $2.6 million rug pull on the FCS BNB Chain [BNB] token. DeFiYield revealed that $200,000 was stolen from the Doglands Metaverse gaming platform and another $150,000 was lost due to bogus BONK [BONK] tokens.

On 4 January, a victim of a phishing attack on the GMX decentralized trading protocol lost as much as $4 million. Despite the comparatively quiet month, the blockchain security firm CertiK warned in early January that assaults and exploits are unlikely to slow down this year.

DeFi remains the most vulnerable

As in prior years, black hat hackers continued to favor DeFi as their top target. 155 attacks cost the DeFi ecosystem $3.1 billion in losses in 2022, a significant rise over the previous year. 

DeFi suffered 107 distinct attacks totaling $2.4 billion in 2021, an increase of 56.2%. A different estimate by the crypto data aggregator Token Terminal claims that 50% of DeFi vulnerabilities target cross-chain bridges.

CeFi, which witnessed a decline from the year prior and a small portion of DeFi’s hack-related losses last year, contrasted adversely with this. The research states that there were only 13 cyberattacks on CeFi projects, costing $769 million. CeFi lost $6 billion in nice incidents in 2021, which amounted to a significant drop of 87.3%.

The biggest losses

In 2022, BNB Chain and the layer-1 blockchain Ethereum [ETH] were two chains that were most frequently attacked, accounting for 63.3% of all chain attacks. 2021 witnessed 43 attacks were against the network. However, the number of attacks on the BNB Chain increased by 51.2%.

Now, about 49 instances, or 27.2% of all attacks across all targeted chains occurred on Ethereum. This figure indicated an 8.9% rise over the 45 attacks that Ethereum experienced in 2021.