August 2024 Crypto Security Report: Over $300 Million Lost to Exploits, Hacks, and Scams

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The month of August 2024 has seen many misfortunes with regard to the crypto space, which saw a rise in crypto loss of approximately $300.6 million to hackers, fraudsters, and other sorts of swindlers. Certik Alerts has reported this as the second-highest monthly loss for the year 2024 after a month which was laden with so many large losses.

The largest share of what was lost was as a result of exploits, which comprised roughly $308. 8 million. These incidents remind us that threats remain constant in the cryptosphere and hackers keep discovering and attacking new smart contracts and decentralized platforms.

Furthermore, $1.2 million worth of crypto was drained through more advanced forms of attack such as flash loan attacks. These attacks involve influencing the market by fast borrowing and repaying and they end up causing a lot of losses to DeFi protocols.

Pump-and-dump schemes, also known as exit scams in which developers of such projects take off with investors’ money, also played a role in the losses although in small proportions in that about $0. 8 million reported. 

The losses which were incurred were large but there was an indication of an aspect of recovering about $10. 3 million, thus stilling the effect. The continued exposure to the use of exploits this month underlines that the crypto space has remaining weak areas, particularly in DeFi.

Hackings were among the most important events that happened in August and two of them were the significant ones. The Ronin Network hack that occurred, where more than $9. 8 million was stolen, and the Nexera exploit in which traders lost $1. 5 million. 

Both of them originated from newly developed weaknesses aligned with code updates, stressing the necessity of high levels of security while implementing code changes or optimisations.

The number of incidents has slightly reduced compared with the previous months, but the resulting losses remain rather significant. This continued pattern of large-scale losses shows that the crypto industry is still the prime target for malicious actors, and the DeFi protocols are one of the fields that are most exposed to them.

In the future, more attention to the threats in the sphere and stronger security measures will be important in order to avoid similar problems and preserve investors’ funds.