Crypto Sector Suffers $88M Loss From October Hacks: Report

According to cybersecurity firm PeckShieldAlert, the cryptocurrency space faced approximately 20 hacking incidents in October 2024, with total losses reaching around $88.47 million.

Five significant breaches accounted for most of the losses, with Radiant Capital experiencing the largest setback.

The Top October Crypto Hacks

The firm revealed that among the top five incidents in October was the Radiant Capital exploit, where millions in crypto assets were bridged to Ethereum. Additionally, a wallet likely controlled by the U.S. government was compromised, resulting in a $20 million loss.

The Radiant Capital episode happened on October 17, with blockchain security firm Ancilia Inc. issuing an alert for suspicious activity on the protocol’s smart contract on the BNB Chain. Several on-chain security experts gave different estimations of the loss, with Spot on Chain giving a final assessment of $53 million.

This was the platform’s second breach this year; in January 2024, it suffered a $4.5 million loss due to a separate vulnerability in its smart contracts.

CryptoPotato reported the high-profile incident on October 24 where criminals compromised a cryptocurrency wallet likely controlled by the U.S. government. The wallet held assets seized in the 2016 Bitfinex hack and was drained of $20 million. However, the unknown attacker later returned about $19.3 million to the breached wallet.

Arkham Intelligence had traced the funds’ movement to an address beginning with “0x348,” which contained cryptocurrencies such as USD Coin (USDC), Tether (USDT), and Ethereum (ETH).

In the case of EigenLayer, $5.7 million was stolen and then laundered through the HitBTC and Bybit exchanges. The exploit was executed on October 4, after which the project’s team announced it was investigating “unapproved selling activity” from a now-flagged wallet address.

More Incidents

Elsewhere, the Tapioca Foundation, a decentralized finance platform on the BNB Chain, lost $4.7 million in a social engineering attack. In that occurrence, hackers used a compromised key to gain control of the project’s token vesting contract, allowing them to mint an infinite amount of USDO tokens.

They then drained $3 million from the USDO/USDC liquidity pool on Uniswap. After hacking the exploiter, the foundation later recovered approximately 1,000 ETH, valued at over $2.7 million.

Another decentralized protocol, Sunray Finance, had $2.86 million stolen after a malicious smart contract on the Arbitrum chain was upgraded in a single transaction. The attacker used the Across bridge to fund their initial wallet, minted 200 trillion SUN tokens, and swapped them for USDT. This leads to the SUN token’s value collapsing to zero.