Fewest DeFi exploits since 2022 occurred in December
The “lowest monthly figure” of the year, according to CertiK, was $62.2 million worth of bitcoins taken in December, suggesting that cryptocurrency hackers and exploiters may have slowed down for the 2022 holidays.
The $15 million Helio Protocol event on December 2 was the largest of the month, according to a later tweet on January 1 that further revealed that the 23 biggest exploits were to blame for roughly 98.5% of the $62.2 million total.
On December 31, the blockchain security firm tweeted a list of the most major attacks that month. It noted that exit scams, which totaled $15.5 million, grabbed the most money throughout the month, followed by exploits involving flash loans, which cost $7.6 million.
The protocol that controls the stablecoin HAY (HAY) incurred a loss when a trader borrowed millions of dollars’ worth of HAY by taking advantage of a price differential in Ankr Reward Bearing Staked BNB (aBNBc).
The second-largest occurrence of the month was the $12.9 million flash loan attack that used a bogus collateral token and a malicious price oracle to liquidate the Defrost Finance v1 and v2 protocols on December 23.
At the time, a different exploit led to the creation of 20 trillion aBNBc by an attacker, which caused the price of the decentralised finance (DeFi) protocol Ankr to crash. The loan was considerably undercollateralized due to the Helio trader’s hasty deposit of aBNBc tokens in order to borrow 16 million HAY, which resulted in a loss for the protocol and a depeg of its stablecoin.
Although payments for the v2 attack have not yet been returned, the hacker returned the funds taken from the v1 protocol to an address owned by Defrost days after the exploit.
Due to the need for an admin key to carry out the assault, CertiK classified the issue as a “exit scam.” Defending the key as compromised, Defrost told Cointelegraph that the accusations were false.
With an 89.5% decline from the $595 million in exploits spread across 36 significant events that CertiK reported in November—a figure that was significantly distorted by the $477 million attack of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX—the December result is significantly lower than the month before. Just the ten biggest vulnerabilities of the year in total for 2022 gave bad actors access to almost $2.1 billion, mostly through cross-blockchain bridges and DeFi protocols.
News Summary:
- Fewest DeFi exploits since 2022 occurred in December
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