(Bloomberg) -- The value of crypto hacks almost doubled to $1.6 billion in the first seven months of 2024, inflated by a jump in digital-asset prices, according to Chainalysis Inc.
While the value of funds stolen has surged, the number of hacks rose only marginally to 149 so far this year, up from 145 in the corresponding period of 2023, according a report published by the blockchain analytics firm on Thursday.
“Many crypto asset prices have increased significantly in 2024 and a large part of the growth in value stolen is likely due to that price appreciation,” said Eric Jardine, cybercrimes research lead at Chainalysis, in an emailed response to Bloomberg News.
Fueled by the debut of a crop of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the US in January, Bitcoin rose to a record of near $74,000 in March. A choppier period recently has erased some of those gains, but the original cryptocurrency is still up 38% this year, according to Bloomberg data. Bitcoin made up 40% of the proceeds of this year’s crypto heists, Chainalysis estimated.
A record $3.7 billion of crypto was stolen in 2022 as hackers took advantage of weak security. That number fell to $1.7 billion in 2023 as decentralized finance outfits shored up security and token prices had yet to fully recover from a slump.
This year, the Asia-Pacific region has suffered several of the more eye-grabbing exploits. In the last few months alone, Japanese operator DMM Bitcoin lost $301 million in what was described as “an unauthorized leak,” while India’s WazirX had $235 million drained. Both companies operate crypto exchanges in their respective markets.
“Crypto thieves seem to be returning to their roots and targeting centralized exchanges again after four years focused on their decentralized counterparts, which typically do not trade Bitcoin,” Chainalysis said in the report.
North Korean-linked groups, which have been tied to some of the largest crypto heists, are leveraging increasingly sophisticated social engineering tactics to break into digital-asset platforms, the Chainalysis report said. US law enforcement authorities have previously linked North Korea to large-scale thefts of cryptocurrencies.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
