Crypto industry loses $2.3B to cyber threats in 2024

The crypto industry faced significant losses from cyber threats in 2024, totaling over $2.3 billion across 165 incidents, according to Cyvers' Security, Fraud, and Compliance Report.

This marks a 40% increase from 2023, when losses amounted to $1.69 billion.

Access control incidents were the most damaging, contributing to 81% of the losses despite representing only 41.6% of the total incidents.

These attacks resulted in the theft of $1.9 billion across 67 cases.

Code vulnerabilities caused losses of $456.3 million across 98 incidents.

Address poisoning scams, though less frequent, still accounted for a $68.7 million loss.

Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) was the most affected blockchain, with more than $1.2 billion lost to cybercriminals.

The report also highlighted a rise in fraud trends, though losses were 37% lower than the record $3.78 billion seen in 2022.

In Q1 2024, smart contract vulnerabilities were the primary cause of incidents, while Q3 saw the highest losses at $790 million.

Q4 experienced a 56% decline in losses compared to the same period in 2023.

Among the most notable thefts, the Japanese exchange DMM Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) suffered a $305 million hack, while the Indian exchange WazirX lost $235 million.

The DeFi project Radiant Capital was exploited for $50 million, and the Singaporean exchange BingX lost $52 million.

Despite the losses, the industry saw a significant recovery in 2024, with over $1.3 billion being returned to affected projects, largely thanks to bug bounty programs.

Looking ahead, 2025 may see an increase in cyber threats, including quantum and AI attacks, more targeted attacks on centralised finance (CeFi) platforms, and the growing threat of pig butchering scams.

In 2024, these scams alone caused $3.6 billion in losses across over 150,000 addresses.