Crypto losses explode to $1.53 billion in February following record Bybit hack: Immunefi

Funds exploited from the crypto industry have exploded in February, with $1.53 billion in losses across 9 hacking incidents — a 20x increase month-over-month — according to the latest report from web3 bug bounty and security services platform Immunefi.

The figures also represent an 18x increase on February 2024, when registered losses were $81.6 million, contributing to $1.6 billion in losses year-to-date — up eightfold on the same period last year.

However, the numbers are undoubtedly skewed following Bybit's record $1.46 billion hack last Friday, with losses outside of that confined to just $68.3 million — down 7.6% on January's $73.9 million figure.

The Bybit hack far exceeds the three previous largest hacks on record, including Coincheck's 2018 hack, where $534 million was lost, Mt. Gox's 2014 hack, with $470 million stolen, and FTX's 2022 hack, when $415 million was drained while the exchange was entering bankruptcy proceedings.

North Korea's Lazarus Group is believed to be behind the exploit, with an interim post-mortem report on Wednesday tracing the attack to malicious JavaScript code served from a compromised Safe AWS S3 bucket, not Bybit's infrastructure, confirming it originated outside the crypto exchange.

DeFi hacks on Infini, zkLend, Ionic Money, Cardex, Four.Meme, Cashverse, BankX and GoldReserve NFT made up the remainder of the DeFi losses. No cases of fraud were reported this month.

BNB Chain and Ethereum are the most targeted networks

BNB Chain and Ethereum were the most targeted networks in February, suffering four individual attacks each and accounting for 72.8% of the losses onchain. Abstract, Mode and Optimism suffered a single attack each. 

Immunefi has paid out more than $112 million in ethical hacker and researcher bounties to date. The payouts span three years and result from over 3,000 bug bounty reports, the largest of which was a $10 million award for a vulnerability discovered in Wormhole’s cross-chain protocol.

Immunefi claims to operate the largest blockchain security community with more than 45,000 researchers, saving over $25 billion in user funds across protocols like Polygon, Optimism, Chainlink, The Graph, Synthetix and Sky from being stolen.