The year 2022 was the year that saw the most number of hacks to ever affect crypto. The majority of these exploits were carried out on DeFi platforms, which accounted for one-third of all such activity during the course of the previous year.
Despite the fact that some crypto and DeFi platforms have provided the most disruptive technologies to the financial industry and other industrial sectors, platforms have been exploited owing to the immature nature of the code that they have deployed.
Many people believe that cryptocurrency is nothing more than an experimental platform for a technology that has the potential to be the most ground-breaking ever developed. The scope of this technology may be compared to that of the internet and the dot-com era, which launched on top of it.
On the other hand, 2022 has proven to be a very challenging year for this technology, since there has been an abundance of fraudulent activities and hacks. More than three billion dollars’ worth of value was allegedly taken without permission, as stated in an article published on Forbes. The following are the eight most effective shortcuts:
Hackers stole about $625 million worth of ether and USD coin from the Ronin Network, which is a blockchain for the Axie Infinity video game. The United States Department of the Treasury later established a connection between the theft and the hacker outfit known as Lazarus Group, which was supported by the North Korean government.
Wormhole Network: $325 million—On February 2, an unidentified hacker exploited a weakness in the Wormhole Network, which is a protocol that enables users to transport cryptocurrencies and NFTs between multiple blockchains. The hacker stole $325 million from the network. Without providing the required collateral, the attacker generated 120,000 wETH, which has a current market value of around $325 million. Wormhole’s parent firm, Jump Crypto, was eventually responsible for replacing the monies that were misappropriated.
On August 1, a hacker took advantage of a vulnerability in the technology that was used by Nomad and stole around $190 million worth of tokens. There were dozens of imitators who participated in the heist. After begging with users to return the funds, Nomad was successful in recovering more than $20 million in user funds.
Beanstalk Farms: $182 million – In April, an attacker stole more than $150 million worth of cryptocurrency from Beanstalk Farms, a stablecoin project based on Ethereum. The hacker was able to borrow approximately one billion dollars’ worth of crypto using a flash loan from the Aave protocol. As a result, he gained a voting interest in Beanstalk equal to 67% of the total. The hacker was able to move the Beanstalk tokens to their own wallet by gaining this supermajority and then transferring the tokens.
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The London-based cryptocurrency market maker, Wintermute, suffered a cyberattack on September 20 that resulted in the loss of 160 million dollars. It is thought that hackers employed brute-force computing to generate all of the possible passwords to a firm vanity address.
Avraham Eisenberg demanded a ransom of $112 million worth of tokens from Mango Markets, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, in order to force the company to pay off bad debt. Mango Markets was forced to fund $112 million in debt. Eisenberg took big holdings in perpetual futures on the dollar-pegged USD coin using two accounts on the site, which caused the price of the coin to skyrocket tenfold on other decentralized exchanges. [Eisenberg] After that, he loaned a number of tokens from Mango in order to withdraw them, using the profit he had previously made.
BNB Smart Chain XCN2: $110 million On October 6, cybercriminals made off with an estimated $110 million worth of cryptocurrency from a platform linked with Binance called the BSC Token Hub. The “flash loan exploit” was cited as the cause of the hacking incident by Binance, and the stolen monies were later recovered.
Harmony Horizon Bridge: $100 million – There were concerns about the bridge even before it was hacked for $100 million in various cryptocurrencies in June of 2022. This is because the tiny number of validators for its multi-sig wallet made it vulnerable to assault.
Source – cryptodaily
