Crypto sector suffers $88 million in losses due to October hacks: report

According to cybersecurity firm PeckShieldAlert, the cryptocurrency space faced approximately 20 hacking incidents in October 2024, with total losses of around $88.47 million.

Five significant defaults accounted for the majority of losses, with Radiant Capital experiencing the largest pullback.

October’s Best Crypto Hacks

The firm revealed that among the top five incidents in October was the Radiant Capital exploit, where millions of crypto assets were connected to Ethereum. Additionally, a wallet likely controlled by the US government was compromised, resulting in a loss of $20 million.

Radiant Capital’s episode took place on October 17, with blockchain security company Ancilia Inc. issued a suspicious activity alert in the protocol smart contract on the BNB chain. Various on-chain security experts gave different estimates of the loss, with Spot on Chain putting a final valuation of $53 million.

This was the platform’s second breach this year; in January 2024, it suffered a loss of $4.5 million due to a separate vulnerability in its smart contracts.

CryptoPotato reported on the high-profile incident on October 24 in which criminals compromised a cryptocurrency wallet likely controlled by the US government. The wallet contained assets seized in the 2016 Bitfinex hack and $20 million was drained. However, the unknown attacker later returned about $19.3 million to the cracked wallet.

Arkham Intelligence had traced the movement of the funds to an address starting with “0x348”, which contained cryptocurrencies such as USD Coin (USDC), Tether (USDT) and Ethereum (ETH).

In the case of EigenLayer, $5.7 million was stolen and then laundered through the HitBTC and Bybit exchanges. The exploit was executed on October 4th, after which the project team announced that it was investigating “unapproved selling activity” from a now flagged wallet address.

More incidences

Elsewhere, the Tapioca Foundation, a decentralized financial platform on the BNB chain, lost $4.7 million in a social engineering attack. In this case, hackers used a compromised key to gain control of the project’s token acquisition contract, allowing them to mint an infinite amount of USDO tokens.

They then drained $3 million from the USDO/USDC liquidity pool on Uniswap. After hacking the exploit, the foundation recovered approximately 1,000 ETH, valued at over $2.7 million.

Another decentralized protocol, Sunray Finance, had $2.86 million stolen after a malicious smart contract was updated on the Arbitrum chain in a single transaction. The attacker used the Across bridge to fund his initial wallet, minted 200 trillion SUN tokens and exchanged them for USDT. This causes the value of the SUN token to sink to zero.

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