Over $30 billion has vanished in over 1,100 crypto hacks since 2012, a recent SlowMist report has revealed. The most common types of hacks were smart contract vulnerabilities, rug pulls, and flash loan attacks, each accounting for over 80 hack events, followed by scams, private key leaks, phishing attacks, hot wallet thefts, hacked Discord accounts, transaction congestion attacks, and roll back attacks, with event numbers rather evenly distributed between 26 and 52.
Exchange platforms took the biggest hit, with losses to hacks exceeding $10 billion. Notable attacks include the infamous Mt. Gox and Bitfinex hacks, with 850,000 BTC and nearly 120,000 BTC, respectively, lost to criminals. Since the events took place, the former platform managed to recover 200,000 BTC, while Bitfinex was lucky to recoup over three-fourths of its losses, with 94,000 BTC recovered for the platform by DOJ special agents in 2022.
The most frequently targeted ecosystem was Ethereum, with 3,123,752,416.28 dollars lost to 218 hack events. Over 1.45 billion dollars were drained from the Binance smart contract (BSC) ecosystem in 162 hacks, and EOS was hit 119 times for a total of nearly 26 million dollars.
The early 2010s and 2019-2021 witnessed the highest losses, while security incidents have calmed since 2022. The losses reported by SlowMist amount to 2.5% of the current cryptocurrency market capitalization.
