Crypto industry suffers $88 million loss following October hacks: report

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

Five significant violations accounted for most of the losses, with Radiant Capital suffering the largest setback.

The best crypto hacks of October

The company revealed that one of the top five incidents in October included the Radiant Capital exploit, where millions of crypto assets were linked to Ethereum. Additionally, a wallet likely controlled by the US government was compromised, resulting in a loss of $20 million.

The Radiant Capital episode occurred 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 have given different estimates of the loss, with Spot on Chain giving a final valuation of $53 million.

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

CryptoPotato reported on the high-profile October 24 incident in which criminals compromised a cryptocurrency wallet likely controlled by the US government. The wallet contained assets seized in the 2016 Bitfinex hack and was drained of $20 million. However, the unknown attacker later returned approximately $19.3 million to the hacked wallet.

Arkham Intelligence had traced the movement of funds to an address starting 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 team announced that it was investigating “unapproved sales activity” from a now-reported 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 this event, hackers used a compromised key to take control of the project’s token acquisition contract, allowing them to create an infinite supply of USDO tokens.

They then drained $3 million from the USDO/USDC liquidity pool on Uniswap. After hacking the exploiter, the foundation then 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 was upgraded on the Arbitrum chain in a single transaction. The attacker used the Across bridge to fund his initial wallet, created 200 trillion SUN tokens and exchanged them for USDT. This leads to the value of the SUN token collapsing to zero.