A massive $3bn worth of crypto has been stolen by hackers so far in 2022, with over $760m grabbed in October alone, a security firm has said.
The significant losses due to hacking and protocol exploits was reported by the blockchain security company PeckShield on Twitter on Monday, with the firm saying losses this year have already doubled compared to last year.
In 2021, $1.55bn were stolen by hackers, while just $0.25bn were lost to hackers in 2020, according to PeckShield’s data.
Notably, PeckShield also pointed out that some hackers do return stolen funds. This is a practice that has been quite common in the crypto world, where some hackers have shown that they are more interested in exposing protocol vulnerabilities rather than enrich themselves.
Out of the $760.2m stolen in October, around $100m has already been returned, the firm said.
In terms of which protocols have suffered the most from hacking last month, BNB Chain (formerly Binance Chain/Binance Smart Chain) stood out as the blockchain that lost the most by far. For the month of October, BNB Chain lost a whopping $586m, more than twice the amount lost to hacking across all protocols in all of 2020, PeckShield’s data showed.
Coming in second was the Solana-based DeFi lending platform Mango Markets with a loss of $48m, after hackers behind a $100m exploit in mid-October returned more than half of the stolen money.
“I was involved with a team that operated a highly profitable trading strategy last week,” Avraham Eisenberg, a member of the group behind the Mango exploit, admitted in a tweet at the time. “I helped negotiate a settlement agreement with the insurance fund with the goal of making all users whole […],” Eisenberg added.
Third on the list of the biggest hacks in October came the decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator Transit Swap, which lost $23 million in a hack – before $16.1 million was returned.
“With the joint efforts of all parties, the hacker has returned about 70% of the stolen assets,” the team behind Transit Swap wrote on Twitter at the time, while asking the hacker to personally reach out to the team to coordinate a return of the funds.
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