August Blockchain Security Report: Phishing Victims Top 9K, Ronin Hackers Returned $12M

Security incidents were rampant in the cryptocurrency space last month, a new blockchain security report revealed, with losses estimated to have reached a staggering $316 million.

KEY POINTS

Last month, there was a surge in security incidents in the cryptocurrency industry, with an estimated loss of $316 million, and only $13.58 million was recovered, a new blockchain security report revealed.

The attacks ranged from account compromises, frontend breaches, contract vulnerabilities, to a method that many exploiters have benefited from over the years: phishing, according to blockchain security firm SlowMist.

Phishing Victims Top 9K

SlowMist's August security report, published Monday, showed that there were 9,145 victims of phishing scams in the crypto industry last month, according to data from Web3 anti-fraud platform Scam Sniffer.

One victim lost a staggering $55.43 million in DAI tokens after signing a phishing transaction that targeted their DeFi Saver Proxy. Analysis by anti-money laundering tracking system MistTrack later revealed that most of the stolen tokens were later swapped for Ether (ETH).

SlowMist noted that most of the phishing attacks in August occurred on Discord. It also highlighted that hackers have been targeting well-known blockchain projects in recent years.

Top Exploits in August

Among the top security incidents analyzed by SlowMist was the hacking of the Ronin Network, where the gaming blockchain network experienced abnormal withdrawals of cross-chain assets on its Ronin Bridge project.

The Ronin case is particularly interesting because the hackers returned the entire $12 million in pilfered Ether and USD Coin (USDC) tokens. The gaming blockchain said it was alerted by "white hats" to the security breach, which led to the temporary pausing of the bridge.

There was a lot of buzz about the incident, with some crypto users and Ronin gamers questioning why the white hat initially wanted to "negotiate" instead of just returning the funds. The white hat was paid a $500,000 bounty, according to SlowMist.

Another top incident last month was the "suspicious transfer" of a whopping 4,064 Bitcoin (then valued at about $238 million) that was first detected by prominent crypto sleuth ZachXBT, who revealed that the stolen funds were immediately moved to various crypto platforms, including ThorChain. ZachXBT later announced that $205,000 had been returned to the victim.

Seven hours ago a suspicious transfer was made from a potential victim for 4064 BTC ($238M)

Transaction hash4b277ba298830ea538086114803b9487558bb093b5083e383e94db687fbe9090

Funds were quickly transferred to ThorChain, eXch, Kucoin, ChangeNow, Railgun, Avalanche Bridge.

Crypto Losses Still Very High

The August losses are much higher than what the crypto industry lost in July, which was around $266 million to exploits and scams. July, however, was a big month for the sector with the highly publicized $230 million exploit of Indian crypto exchange giant WazirX.

Akshay Nassa, founder of 100% encrypted decentralized exchange Chimp Exchange, said at the time that the state of security in the industry only goes to show how exploiters are evolving their methods just as much as crypto companies are working to improve their security measures.