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657 million dollars in crypto stolen in "Hacktober"

Hacktober ends with cryptocurrencies stolen worth about 657 million USD.

By Mike Hesp
• 2 min read

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"Hacktober" ends with cryptocurrencies stolen worth about 657 million USD. The yearly tally is twice as high as in 2021. This year October was especially spooky, at least for crypto investors. View post on X USD: a scary stat.

The incidents: Binance, Mango, and DAOs

The month kicked off with shocking news: the Binance Smart Chain was hacked. An exploit apparently led to the unauthorized creation of extra Binance tokens, according to founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao in a statement. The attacker would have walked away with nearly $700 million if the chain had not halted early. A hard fork quickly fixed the issue.

Crypto exchange MangoMarkets, popular with DeFi investors, wasn’t spared in "Hacktober" either. The hacker Avaraham Eisenburg stole about $114 million and claimed he acted according to the protocol. He then proposed to let him hold the cryptocurrencies officially. Because the attacker captured the majority of votes by withholding the stolen MNGO tokens, his plan succeeded—at least partially: $47 million is now his.

WinterMute, a crypto market maker, also fell victim to a hack. After about $160 million were stolen from the DeFi platform, CEO Evgeny Gaevoy announced insolvency.

Other affected projects didn’t get stolen assets back, but they weren’t hit as hard either. In total, 53 different protocols were attacked. The biggest victims are often the investors themselves.

$3 billion in 10 months

With the end of "Hacktober" the losses in 2022 so far total nearly $3 billion, according to security firm PeckShield. That figure is already twice as high as last year.

March was especially influential in driving this rise. At that time, the Ronin bridge was attacked and more than $600 million disappeared. It was the largest crypto hack to date.

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