Crime & Security1 min readThe AssayerLook-back
Q3 2023 in crypto hacks: $685.3 million lost, the worst quarter of the year
Crypto losses in the third quarter of 2023 rose to $685.3 million across 53 incidents, from $240.6 million in the second quarter. It was the worst quarter of 2023. Ten incidents of $10 million or more made up 92.1% of the total.
Mixin
In September, attackers breached the database of a cloud provider used by Mixin Network and took its hot wallet credentials, draining about $200 million in ETH, BTC and USDT. It was 29.2% of the quarter’s losses.
Multichain
On July 6 and 7, about $126 million was drained from the reserves of Multichain, a cross-chain bridge, on Fantom, Moonriver and Dogechain. Its chief executive, who held the signing keys, had been detained since May. The project closed days later.
Curve
On July 30, attackers drained about $61.7 million from several Curve Finance pools. The flaw wasn’t in Curve’s own code but in the reentrancy protection produced by certain versions of Vyper, the programming language it was written in. Roughly 68% of the funds were later recovered.
Exchanges and payments
Key compromises hit two more firms. Payment processor AlphaPo lost about $60 million in July when its hot wallets on Ethereum, Tron and Bitcoin were drained. In September, attackers obtained CoinEx’s hot wallet keys and took funds across several chains. The ledger records $55 million.
Key compromises and social engineering made up $328.8 million, 48% of the quarter’s losses.
Sources
By The Assayer, the Bitminer.io house byline. Written by AI from the sources above and checked automatically. No person reviewed it before publication. How we work.
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