Q4 2023 in crypto hacks: Poloniex and two bridges lost $294 million

Crypto losses in the fourth quarter of 2023 came to $430.3 million across 49 incidents, down from $685.3 million in the third quarter and $1.32 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Poloniex

On November 10, attackers compromised Poloniex’s hot wallet keys, probably through malware or social engineering, and drained about $126 million across Ethereum, Tron and Bitcoin. The exchange’s owner pledged to repay users in full. It was 29.3% of the quarter’s losses.

Two bridges

Bridges came back in November and December. Attackers took over the operator account of the HECO Chain bridge to Ethereum and drained about $86.6 million. On the last day of the year, Orbit Bridge lost roughly $81.5 million after attackers compromised seven of the ten private keys on its multisig wallet.

Together, Poloniex and the two bridges lost $294 million, 68.4% of the quarter.

Code and keys

On November 22, the same day as the HECO breach, an attacker drained about $48 million from KyberSwap Elastic using a double rounding error in its swap math. Trading firm Kronos Research lost about $26 million after attackers obtained its API keys.

The year

Across 2023, the ledger records 196 incidents and $1.63 billion in known losses, against 175 incidents and $3.63 billion in 2022. There were more incidents, but none came close to 2022’s bridge losses.

Sources

1. DefiLlama hacks data
2. Bitminer.io failures ledger: 2023

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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