The five worst crypto-related breaches and defects in 2022

The cryptocurrency market has experienced a significant decline in price, the collapse of major players, and the theft of billions of dollars through hacks and attacks.

Chainalysis predicted 2022 to be the “largest year ever for hacker activities” before October was even halfway over.

As of December 29, $2.1 billion had been taken from crypto systems by the ten biggest attacks of 2022. These hacks and vulnerabilities are listed here, ranked from smallest to largest.

Ronin bridge hack

On March 23, 2022, the Ronin bridge was abused for about $612 million, consisting of 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USD Coin.

For the play-to-earn non fungible token (NFT) game Axie Infinity, Ronin was developed as an Ethereum sidechain. The developers of Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis, claimed that the attackers were able to obtain private keys, compromise validator nodes, and accept deals that emptied the bridge of its cash.

On April 14, the U.S. Treasury Department revised its list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) to account for the potential involvement of Lazarus Group in the bridge's exploit.

The biggest cryptocurrency theft in history occurred with the Ronin bridge hack.

FTX wallet hack

Elliptic claims that about $477 million worth of cryptocurrency was taken during a series of unlawful transactions that happened at the exchange on Nov. 11 and 12, the first day of FTX's bankruptcy process.

In an interview on Nov. 16, Sam Bankman-Fried stated that he thought it was “either an ex-employee or someplace someone installed malware on an ex-computer” employee's and that he had narrowed the offender down to eight persons before he was barred from the company's networks.

The US Department of Justice reportedly began looking into the disappearance of around $372 million of the stolen cryptocurrency on December 27.

Wormhole bridge exploit

On February 2, a vulnerability in the Wormhole token bridge caused the loss of 120,000 Wrapped Ether (wETH) tokens valued at $321 million.

Users can transfer and receive cryptocurrency across different blockchains via Wormhole. Due to a flaw on the protocol's smart contract, a hacker was capable of generating 120,000 wETH on Solana.

was then able to exchange this for ETH because it wasn't backed by any collateral.

The third-largest protocol loss altogether for the year at the moment and the biggest breach in 2022.

Nomad token bridge exploit

Multiple assailants stole $190 million from the Nomad token bridge on August 2, which enables users to exchange cryptocurrencies across different blockchains.

The attack was caused by a flaw in smart contracts that improperly validated transactional parameters.

Different individuals were able to mimic the actions of the initial attacker to direct money to themselves, appearing to be both friendly and evil. According to research, 88% of the addresses involved in the exploit were “copycats.”

White hat hackers were only capable of intercepting and transferring to the system about $32.6 million worth of money.

Wintermute hack

Wintermute, a cryptocurrency market maker with headquarters in the United Kingdom, experienced a hot wallets breach that resulted in the transfer of about $160 million across 70 tokens.

The app Profanity, which allows users to establish vanity crypto identities and has a known flaw, was likely used to produce the weak private key that was allegedly targeted, according to analysis by blockchain security company CertiK.

According to CertiK, this gave the hacker access to a feature that let him or her modify the platform's swap agreement to their own using the private key.

Blockchain security company BlockSec refuted conspiracy theories that claimed the breach was a “inside job” because of how it was executed, saying the claims were “not persuasive enough.”

As a reminder, WikiBit is ready to help you search the qualifications and reputation of projects in a bid to protect you from hidden dangers in this risky industry!

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