The crypto world is reeling under loss from cyber attacks and scams this year. Although the amount of losses declined in October, the yearly loss has crossed $1.4 billion while there are still 2 months left in 2024.
As per the latest report of web3 bug bounty and security services platform Immunefi, the crypto world experienced 179 hacks and scams in 2024 which amounted to a loss of over $1.4 billion.
However, in October, the amount of loss declined by 56.6% as the crypto market experienced $55.1 million losses this month compared to the $126.9 million observed in September. This slowdown in the monthly loss indicates that this year's figures will have a 1% y-o-y decrease.
Immunefi said the losses are going downward in general as more and more crypto projects are enhancing the auditing process with bug bounty programs and smart contract designs. Crypto projects are also employing more skilled security professionals to adopt robust security measures.
According to Immunefi, the current security stack fairs much better than what it was 2-3 years ago. This has made it difficult for threat actors to do scams exploiting the vulnerabilities of the crypto ecosystem.
In October this year, there were only 7 cybersecurity incidents which resulted in the second lowest monthly loss of 2024. However, it shows a 114% increase in hacks compared to the same period last year. Most of the October losses were from the Radiant Capital $50 million hack and the Tapioca DAO $4.4 million exploit.
P719, Morpho Labs, Ramses Exchange, HYDT and Fire made up the remainder of the DeFi losses, with no recorded CeFi incidents this month.
This month's statistics also revealed that most losses are due to hacks, not cyber frauds as 100% of Oçtober losses came from hacks. While BNB faced 50% of the October hacks, Arbitrum and Ethereum experienced 25% each.
Immunefi has roped in Ethereum as its whitehat hackers' blockchain of choice. However other blockchains like Solana, Optimism, Arbitrum and Polygon are also rising.
The firm had to pay over $100 million in ethical hacker and researcher bounties to date for more than 3000 bug bounty reports over 3 years. The biggest payout was of $10 million which was awarded for discovering a vulnerability in the Wormhole’s cross-chain protocol.
The company has the biggest blockchain security community with 45000 researchers at their disposal. These experts save more than $25 billion in user funds from different protocols like MakerDAO, Polygon, Synthetix, Optimism, The Graph and Chainlink.