A record month in a record year—and the month isn’t even half over.
In October alone, $718 million was stolen from decentralized finance protocols, according to Chainalysis. “At this rate, 2022 will likely surpass 2021 as the biggest year for hacking on record. So far, hackers have grossed over $3 billion dollars across 125 hacks,” the blockchain intelligence firm wrote on Twitter.
“After four hacks yesterday, October is now the biggest month in the biggest year ever for hacking activity, with more than half the month still to go.”
As Chainalysis notes, this month has been a rough one. On Tuesday, there were multiple hacks, including Temple DAO’s $2.3 million STAX exploit and Solana-based decentralized trading platform Mango’s $100 million exploit.
Cross-chain bridges in particular have been repeatedly attacked this year.
“Cross-chain bridges remain a major target for hackers, with three bridges breached this month and nearly $600 million stolen, accounting for 82% of losses this month and 64% of losses all year,” Chainalysis wrote.
Most notably of late, a bridge used by Binance, the largest crypto exchange, fell victim to a $100 million hack. Earlier this year, in February, the Wormhole bridge had a $325 million exploit, and in March, Axie Infinity’ s Ronin bridge had a $625 million exploit.
“While not foolproof, a valuable first step towards addressing security issues is for extremely rigorous code audits to become the gold standard,” Erin Plante, vice president of investigations at Chainalysis, recently told Coins2Day, “both for developers building protocols and investors evaluating them.”