Crime & Security1 min readThe AssayerLook-back
Q4 2024 in crypto hacks: losses fell to $178.3 million, the lowest quarter of the year
The last quarter of 2024 had more incidents than the one before it but far smaller losses. The ledger records 54 incidents with a known loss and $178.3 million lost, down from $427.3 million in the third quarter and $430.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2023.
It was the lowest quarter of the year. No centralised exchange suffered a loss on the scale of DMM Bitcoin or WazirX. Exchanges lost $15.4 million across two incidents.
Radiant and the signing screen
The largest loss was Radiant V2, a lending protocol, which lost $50 million on October 16. Attackers infected the devices of three core contributors with macOS malware and tampered with the Safe{Wallet} front-end. The signers approved what looked like routine transactions, which handed control of Radiant’s lending markets on BSC and Arbitrum to the attackers. It was 28% of the quarter’s losses.
Signers approving transactions they couldn’t properly see would return on a much larger scale a few months later, at Bybit.
A government wallet
On October 24, the private key of a dormant US government wallet was compromised. It held about $20 million from the 2016 Bitfinex seizures. About $19.3 million was recovered within a day.
Other losses came from users rather than protocols. On November 16, attackers obtained private keys from the DEXX memecoin trading terminal and drained the Solana wallets of at least 900 users. The ledger records $21 million, and later estimates reached $30 million. The day before, ThalaSwap lost $25.5 million to missing balance checks in its farming contracts, then recovered $25 million within six hours through negotiation with the attacker.
The year
Across 2024, the four quarters added up to 206 incidents and $1.67 billion in known losses. Key compromises and social engineering accounted for 68.2% of fourth-quarter losses, in line with the rest of the year.
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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