Crypto companies, defi lost $266m to hackers in July

In July 2024, the cryptocurrency industry was hit by a series of devastating attacks, causing losses of approximately $266 million.

Blockchain research firm PeckShield announced an X text As of August 1, attacks on decentralized protocols in July reportedly reached $266 million, a 51% increase compared to the $176 million reported in June.

The most notable breach last month involved one of India’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, WazirX, which lost $230 million in a highly sophisticated attack by North Korean hackers. The attack dealt a major blow to the exchange, causing a pause in withdrawals. WazirX subsequently launched a program to recover the funds.

Another notable incident was a governance attack on Compound Finance, a decentralized lending protocol, by a group known as the “Golden Boys.” The group pushed through a proposal to allocate 499,000 COMP tokens worth $24 million to a vault under their control.

Cross-chain liquidity aggregation protocol LI.FI also fell victim to an attack on July 16, resulting in losses of $9.73 million. Additionally, Bittensor, a decentralized machine learning network, was one of the first protocols to be exploited last month, losing $8 million on July 3 due to an attack targeting its staking mechanism.

Meanwhile, Rho Markets, a lending protocol, suffered a $7.6 million breach. However, in an interesting twist, the abusers attempted to return the stolen funds and claimed that the incident was not a hack.

On July 31, it was confirmed that the Terra blockchain protocol had also been subject to an attack, resulting in a loss of $6.8 million across multiple cryptocurrencies. The attack exploited a re-entry vulnerability that was identified several months ago, crypto.news reported.

Liquidity protocol Dough Finance lost $1.8 million in Ethereum (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC) in a flash loan attack on July 12. Similarly, lending and borrowing protocol Minterest suffered a loss of $1.4 million due to currency manipulation on one of its markets.

Decentralized staking platform MonoSwap also reported a $1.3 million loss due to a hack that allowed attackers to withdraw staked liquidity from the protocol. Finally, another decentralized finance platform, Delta Prime, suffered a $1 million breach, but $900,000 of the stolen funds were later recovered.