Crypto market saw $88M loss from October hacks: Report

Despite crypto having all the merits that make it attractive, one of its greatest weaknesses is cyber security. In October, crypto lost $88.477 million. This, compared to previous months in 2024, has lost the second least amount, followed by April, which lost $60.19 million. 

Cybersecurity firm PeckShieldAlert tweeted on their x account, “In October 2024, there were ~20 hacks in the crypto space, resulting in losses of ~$88.47 million.”

Top three crypto hacks in October 

As per the report, Radiant Capital suffered its second attack of the year in October. The first incident involved a flash loan in which the hackers stole about $4.5 million from the protocol. 

This second attack is nothing compared to the first one, as it drained $53 million from user wallets. The firm tweeted on its X platform, “The attackers exploited multiple developers’ hardware wallets through a highly advanced malware injection.” According to on-chain data, Radiant Capital lost the most money to hackers last month.

Secondly, the US government seizure fund was hacked for $2 million, according to blockchain analysts from Arkham Intelligence. Arkham said it detected that the crypto was “suspiciously moved” from a government wallet to an unknown wallet. 

The moved funds were made up of stablecoins such as USDC, USDT, and Ethereum (ETH). However, the unknown attacker later returned about $19.3 million to the wallet.

Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer was also hacked for $5.7 million. The amount was 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.

Private key comprises implemented for hacking

In addition, the Tapioca Foundation and Sunray Finance, which are both decentralized finance platforms, took hacker hits.

Tapioca DAO became one of many DeFi projects that suffered a private key compromise. In this case, the attacker stole an estimated $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, giving them access to mint an unlimited amount of USDO tokens.

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

Sunray Finance also succumbed to another private key compromise, allowing the exploiter to gain control of the SUN and ARC tokens and sell them off, draining the funds from DEX pairs. 

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. 

The entity, on October 31st, released a statement that “Sunray Treasury Asset Transfer Statement, Treasury as a public asset of the community, is secure, transparent, publicly traceable, and we are accelerating and working hard to recover all data. Please be patient and wait for specific details.”