$313m in crypto lost to hackers, phishers in August: Report

While there was a significant increase in the amount of cryptocurrencies falling victim to hacker and phishing attacks in August, the market was surrounded by uncertainty.

The crypto ecosystem lost $313.86 million in more than 10 different attacks last month, according to an X post by blockchain security firm PeckShield. Of that number, more than $293 million was lost to phishing attacks.

This represents an 18% increase in crypto assets lost to fraudulent actors since July. According to a crypto.news report, crypto and decentralized finance companies lost $266 million to hackers across 16 incidents in total.

Hackers hunting whales

The biggest attack involved a whale who lost 4,064 Bitcoins (BTC) worth around $238 million in a phishing attack on August 19. The attacker soon moved the funds to various crypto platforms including THORChain, KuCoin, and Railgun.

Similarly, another whale lost over $55 million worth of Dai (DAI) stablecoins to a phishing attack. Data suggests that the funds were stored on the fourth-largest DeFi protocol Maker.

According to on-chain data, the attacker transferred the funds to Ethereum (ETH) and currently does not have any assets at the address used for the attack.

On August 6, Ronin Network saw a malicious transaction of 4,000 ETH worth $10 million. Fortunately, the attack was not engineered by rogue actors, instead white hat hackers exploited the Maximum Mintable Value bug.

The hackers soon returned the money and reported the bug to the Ronin Network developers, who then hinted that they would be offering a $500,000 bounty to white hat hackers as a bug bounty.

According to PeckShield, the fourth and fifth largest attacks in August included an unauthorized transaction worth $5.1 million and a $1.8 million Nexera exploit.