Crime & Security1 min readThe AssayerLook-back
Q4 2022 in crypto hacks: BNB Chain’s bridge and FTX lost $1.02 billion
Crypto losses in the fourth quarter of 2022 came to $1.32 billion across 57 incidents, the most incidents of any quarter that year. Nine incidents of $10 million or more made up 95.6% of the total.
The BNB Chain bridge
In early October, an attacker exploited weak proof checks in BNB Chain’s BSC Token Hub bridge to forge proofs and mint 2 million BNB, about $570 million. Binance halted the chain. About $137 million left before it was stopped, and $433 million stayed frozen. It was 43.2% of the quarter’s losses and ranks sixth of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss.
FTX
In November, as FTX filed for bankruptcy, about $450 million in crypto was taken from its wallets. According to the ledger’s record, a SIM-swapping gang used fake IDs at AT&T stores to take over employees’ phone accounts, intercepted their two-factor codes and drained the wallets. It was the quarter’s second-largest loss and most of the $498.1 million lost by exchanges.
Earlier in November, attackers drained about $28 million from Deribit’s hot wallets. Deribit covered the loss from company reserves.
Mango Markets
On October 11, a trader used $5 million to open a position on Mango Markets, pushed up the price of its MANGO token from another account, and borrowed against the inflated collateral. The protocol lost about $115 million.
The year
Across 2022, the ledger records 175 incidents and $3.63 billion in known losses. Bridges were behind the largest: Ronin, the BNB Chain bridge, Wormhole and Nomad lost $1.71 billion between them.
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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