Funds Lost To Crypto Exploits Are Down 92% Year-on-Year

On-chain intelligence firm PeckShield recently published the crypto exploits statistics for January 2023. The first month of the year saw $8.8 million lost to 24 crypto exploits. While $8.8 million is no small amount, it is a significant decrease when compared to the numbers from January last year, when exploiters made away with more than $121 million.

In terms of funds lost to crypto exploits, January’s numbers reflect a whopping 92% decrease year-on-year. The bulk of the exploited amount can be attributed to one blockchain platform, Lendhub DeFi. Last month, hackers stole $6 million from this lending protocol, which ironically marketed itself as the “safest decentralized lending platform.”

#PeckShieldAlert ~24 exploits grabbed $8.8M in January 2023.
As of January 31st, 2023, ~$2.6M worth of stolen funds (~2,668 $BNB & 1,200 $ETH) were transferred into Mixers (TornadoCash, Fixedfloat, and sideshift[.]ai). pic.twitter.com/KlGmDmKFbI

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) January 31, 2023

Thoreum Finance was the victim of January 2023’s second-largest crypto exploit, followed by DeFi lending and borrowing platform Midas Capital. Midas lost 663,101 MATIC worth $660,000 on 16 January after an attacker deployed a flash loan exploit on a Polygon pool on the Jarvis Network.

Furthermore, the OMNI Estate Group and Mycelium were next on the top five crypto projects that fell victim to an exploit last month. The OMNI Real Estate Project (ORT Token) on the BNB chain was hacked due to a vulnerability in their staking pool contract. The exploiter ran away with 236 BNB worth roughly $70,000 at the time. Mycelium also suffered an exploit caused by an arbitrage bot following a discrepancy in its price feed.

According to data gathered by PeckShield, $2.6 million of the stolen crypto were sent to mixer services like Tornado Cash and SideShift.ai. This includes 2668 BNB and 1200 ETH. Data from Etherscan shows that out of the 1200 ETH routed to Tornado cash, 1100 ETH belonged to the exploiter behind the attack on LendHub DeFi.

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