August 2024 Crypto Hacks and Losses: Unpacking the $238 Million Bitcoin Scam

The post August 2024 Crypto Hacks and Losses: Unpacking the $238 Million Bitcoin Scam appeared first on Coinpedia Fintech News

August 2024 was a very eventful time in the cryptocurrency industry where multiple major hacks were recorded and according to the latest peckshield report, the industry lost $313.86 million in the process. The five most common incidents were largely rooted in phishing and unauthorized transfers and exposed the biggest weaknesses of the crypto market.

The largest hack of the month was on August 19 when a whale fell victim to a phishing attack and lost 4,064 Bitcoin, equivalent to $238 million. These particular attacks were seen within a relatively short amount of time and the money was transferred through different platforms including THORChain, KuCoin, and Railgun, and thus its recovery was almost impossible. This loss made up 76% of the entire loss for the month and shows how the threat of phishing is still rife in the crypto space.

Another whale we have seen managed to lose $55.4 million in the Dai stablecoins through phishing. The 1,400 ETH when stolen was kept in the Maker DeFi protocol but the perpetrator exchanged them for Ethereum and embezzled the wallet. The rapid and coherent strike did not leave much chance of the assets being reclaimed.

On 6th August, again, the Ronin Network which previously got compromised in 2022, experienced another cyber attack. However, this time, whitehat hackers used the Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) bug to work out to withdraw 4,000 ETH, which is $10 million. 

The ethical hackers repaid the funds used to conduct the hack to return the vulnerability to Ronin’s developers, who paid a bounty in the amount of half a million dollars. This implies that hackers are most useful when they are ethical and employed by reputable organizations to help with hacking security systems to expose their weaknesses before the bad guys can get to do so.

Another worthy of mention is a case whereby an unauthorized transfer was done which led to a forged $5. 1 million. Despite being relatively less severe than the previous hacks of the month, this was a cumulative addition to the bill that demanded better security for cryptocurrency.

Nexera suffered a $1. 83 million loss by falling for an elaborate social engineering trick. The attackers through a reputation-phishing scam got an employee of Nexera to download what they termed as the job offer contract only to discover it was concealed malware that stole private keys. 

It is for this reason that sophisticated methods of protection such as multi-signature wallets need to be employed in order to curb the loss of important assets in this realm of cryptocurrencies.

These cases give a message that there must be a constant enhancement of security measures and awareness among cryptos’ users and related firms to avoid getting hacked.

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