- April set a monthly record with 29 crypto hacks, according to DefiLlama data, marking the worst month in the industry’s history for the number of incidents.
- Two major incidents accounted for $579 million in losses: a $285 million hack of Drift and a $273 million exploit of Kelp DAO, both stemming from centralised weak points.
- The vast majority of April’s 29 incidents—24 of them—were caused by code bugs, yet these only accounted for about 6.6% of the total $635 million in losses.
April was a historically brutal month for the crypto sector, as 29 different projects suffered hacks or exploits, the highest monthly tally on record according to DefiLlama data. This surge in attacks has sparked a significant crisis of confidence, leaving even ardent believers to question the inherent tradeoffs of decentralized technology.
Consequently, the fast-moving DeFi space, once notorious for exploits but thought to have matured, is back in the limelight for the wrong reasons. “Right now, DeFi seems to be the primary target,” said Michael Pearl of Cyvers, noting a shift toward hacking humans rather than systems.
Meanwhile, the fundamental problem according to Michael Egorov, founder of Curve Finance, is centralisation and the prevalence of single points of failure. “We need to reduce the number of single points of failure as much as possible,” Egorov stated in a comment shared with DL News, advocating for designs that minimize human-centric vulnerabilities.
The attacks on Drift and Kelp DAO perfectly illustrated this centralised risk. North Korean Hackers compromised two Drift employees through social engineering, while Kelp DAO’s reliance on a single-operator crypto bridge configuration was exploited.
However, centralisation was not the only vector; code bugs were the root cause of 83% of April’s incidents. Crypto security experts previously told DL News that advances in Artificial Intelligence are making it cheaper and faster for bad actors to find these vulnerabilities using large language models.
Despite the record number of hacks, April’s total loss of $635 million was not the industry’s worst by amount. The all-time high was in December 2020, when hackers reportedly stole some $3.5 billion from wallets linked to Bitcoin mining firm LuBian, a breach that went unnoticed for nearly five years.
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