The first half of 2024 has been a gold rush for cryptocurrency thefts: hackers took $1.38 billion in crypto, more than double the amount stolen in the corresponding period during 2022, according to the reseachers at TRM Labs. The largest heist of the year was the $300 million in bitcoin stolen from the Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin. Published in May, the report found that the highest losses over 2024 can be attributed to the top five hacks, which constitute 70 per cent of all the losses dealt this year. The biggest vulnerabilities exploited were private key or seed phrase compromises, as well as address poisoning, which occurs when a hacker manages to trick a user into sending funds to a wrong, but similar-looking, crypto address.
TRM Labs notes that it didn’t see obvious improvements in security across the crypto ecosystem that would explain a drop in thefts. Higher average cryptocurrency prices in the first half of the year also helped fuel the increases in value stolen. Attack vectors generally stayed the same as the year before, and the threat landscape continues to leverage longstanding security vulnerabilities inherent in the cryptosphere.
Source: CNBC
