According to blockchain and smart contract security firm Certified Kernel Tech (better known as CertiK), crypto-related exploits, hacks and scams in April resulted in losses worth $103 million. dollars.
Last month’s numbers are far lower than the $211 million in digital assets that criminals siphoned off throughout March 2023.
April incident summary
CertiK estimated that the total amount hackers managed to drain last month from crypto projects was approximately $103.6 million in digital assets. Exit scams generated $9.3 million, while flash loan attacks accounted for nearly $20 million.
Some of the major incidents of April include the $25 million stolen from a large Ethereum Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot that fell victim to a so-called “sandwich attack”. The event occurs when a perpetrator exploits liquidity cracks to execute profitable trades at the expense of vulnerable users.
The Bitrue exchange hack is also worth mentioning. The company suffered a “brief feat” in one of its hot wallets early last month, resulting in losses of $23 million in ETH, QNT, GALA, SHIB, HOT, and MATIC. Bitrue suspended withdrawals until April 18 “to perform additional security checks” and ensured that the remaining wallets were not affected.
The South Korean GDAC was another crypto exchange facing the same problem. Attackers compromise the Gdac Hot Wallet on April 10 and bagged over 60 BTC, 350.5 ETH, 10,000,000 WEMIX, and 220,000 USDT (collectively worth $13 million at the time). The stolen amount was around 23% of the platform’s total assets.
GDAC took emergency action and halted deposits and withdrawals shortly after identifying the hack. It has also worked with Korean agencies and rival companies to detect criminals and resume operations.
Other incidents in the past month include $10.2 million Yearn Finance exploit, $7.5 million Hundred Finance attack, $3.3 million SushiSwap hack, and more.
March numbers were even worse
While last month’s data regarding hacks and exploits in the crypto world may seem grim, it is actually much better than March. At the time, criminals flew $211.5 million in digital currency via 26 attacks.
The Euler Finance exploit that resulted in nearly $200 million in losses accounted for 93% of the total amount. Hackers breached DeFi protocol security in mid-March and dumped tokens in a flash lending attack.
Nevertheless, the attacker, who went by the name “Jacob”, began firing some of the assets at the end of the month and even apologized for the crime. The whole drama ended in early April when the exploiter income all funds.
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