Crypto investors lose almost $700 million to blockchain hackers in Q1, 2022

As the cryptocurrency market continues to develop, it attracts extra consideration from cybercriminals, who’ve stolen practically $700 million value of belongings from crypto platforms in the primary quarter of 2022 alone.

Throughout this era, hackers have managed to get away with $682 million in as many as 72 hack occasions, with greater than half of the losses attributed to hacks on Solana (SOL) and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) ecosystems, in accordance to the current findings by the Atlas VPN staff.

In 4 main assaults, Solana suffered a lack of $397 million. The worst of them was the hack on Wormhole, a communication bridge between Solana and different decentralized finance (DeFi) networks, throughout which the platform misplaced round $334 million.

In the meantime, Binance Smart Chain was the goal as many as 12 occasions, throughout which the crypto hackers took off with a complete quantity of $99 million.

NFTs focused greater than most by hackers

Interestingly, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have confirmed among the many most tasty targets for hackers, accounting for almost $49 million looted in 20 assaults. 

A very common sort of fraudulent exercise in this class was rug pull scams, in which scammers had been launching NFT tasks, solely to disappear with thousands and thousands of {dollars} of investors’ cash.

Finally, crypto exchanges misplaced $42 million in belongings throughout three assaults, whereas customers of the Ethereum platform had been mugged by shut to $25 million in 16 occasions through the noticed interval.

Need for safety consciousness will increase as crypto hacks attain an all-time excessive

As per the Atlas VPN report, the present variety of blockchain-related breaches and scams in the primary quarter of 2022 can be an all-time excessive for the business, representing a 118% enhance in contrast to the identical interval in 2021.

Commenting on the findings, Atlas VPN’s cybersecurity author Vilius Karelis mentioned:

“Blockchain venture safety ought to be one of many main issues for an individual wanting to make investments in cryptocurrency. Most blockchain-related hack occasions occur as a result of cybercriminals exploit flaws in the venture code. A profitable hack might trigger important losses to the creators and investors of the crypto platform.”

The enhance in hacks comes at a time when all the market’s capitalization is rising, in addition to the variety of new digital belongings and crypto exchanges rising in this area.

As Finbold earlier reported, the cryptocurrency market has just lately reclaimed the $2 trillion mark as crypto giants like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) proceed regular positive aspects. 

By press time, the full crypto market was value $2.13 trillion, recording a ten.36% enhance from seven days earlier than and a 17.03% over the month, in accordance to the CoinMarketCap information.