Crypto Market Loses $314M to Hackers and Phishing Attacks in August, Phishing Scams Account for 93% of the Loot

The cryptocurrency market saw a significant rise in losses to hackers and phishing attacks in August, as the industry faced ongoing market volatility.

August saw a significant rise in cryptocurrency market losses due to hacking and phishing attacks amid ongoing market volatility. According to blockchain security firm PeckShield, the crypto industry lost approximately $313.86 million in August from more than ten hacking incidents. Notably, over $293 million of this amount was lost to phishing schemes.

This marks an 18% increase in crypto assets stolen by fraudulent actors compared to July. Data from a report by crypto.news indicates that the previous month saw losses of $266 million through 16 separate incidents targeting cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DeFi) companies.

The Largest Breaches: Whale Attacks and White Hat Hackers

The biggest crypto heist in August involved a so-called crypto “whale” who lost 4,064 Bitcoin (BTC), valued at around $238 million, in a phishing attack on August 19. The stolen Bitcoin was later dispersed to various crypto platforms, including THORChain, KuCoin, and Railgun.

In a separate incident, another whale lost over $55 million in Dai (DAI) stablecoin through phishing. Reports indicate these funds were held in Maker, the fourth-largest DeFi protocol. On-chain data reveals that the attacker converted the stolen funds into Ethereum (ETH) and currently holds no assets in the original address used for the phishing attack.

The Ronin Network also experienced a breach on August 6 involving a 4,000 ETH transaction, valued at $10 million. This incident, however, was conducted by white hat hackers exploiting a Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) vulnerability. The hackers returned the funds and disclosed the bug to Ronin Network’s developers, prompting the company to suggest a $500,000 reward as a bug bounty.

Other Major Breaches

Other notable incidents include an unauthorized transaction worth $5.1 million and Nexera’s $1.8 million exploit, ranking as the fourth and fifth largest breaches, respectively, according to PeckShield.