In 2023, an estimated 1.8 billion dollars were lost to hackers and fraudsters on the web3. Almost a fifth of the losses are attributed to the North Korea-linked hacker group Lazarus.
According to data from the blockchain security platform Immunefi, the biggest hack of the year took place at the peer-to-peer trading platform Mixin Network, costing crypto investors over 200 million dollars.
In second place is the 197-million-dollar haul from the lending platform Euler Finance, followed by the 126-million-dollar hack of the cross-chain bridge protocol Multichain.
Lazarus Plunders Millions
Law enforcement agencies have identified losses of around 309 million dollars attributed to the Lazarus Group, a cybercriminal organization with links to North Korea, the online magazine «Cointelegraph» reports. This corresponds to around 17 percent of the total losses.
According to the data, Lazarus captured funds from the Atomic Wallet hack (100 million dollars), CoinEx (70 million dollars) and Alphapo (60 million dollars), among others.
Not Exactly Fraud
The vast majority of the money lost was due to hacks and not fraud. Only 103 million dollars were lost to clearly identifiable fraud attempts such as rug pulls, while hacks and data breaches resulted in over 1.6 billion dollars in losses. Most of the losses – 1.3 billion dollars – were caused by protocols that claimed to be decentralized.
The total losses of 1.8 billion dollars seem to represent a decrease of more than 52 percent from the previous year when the blockchain security platform Chainalysis reported 3.8 billion dollars in stolen funds.
