Year Ender 2023: Sharp Decline In Cryptocurrency Theft
As 2023 comes to an end, cryptocurrency theft has decreased substantially to around $2 billion from $3.8 billion last year and 3.3 billion in 2021, with the largest being $200 million stolen from Hong Kong-based crypto company Mixin, according to De.FI, a Web3 security firm that runs the REKT database.
In March, crypto lending platform Euler Finance witnessed the robbing of about $197 million before cyber criminals looted $258 million from crypto exchange HTX and $35 million in crypto assets from Atomic Wallet, a mobile and desktop crypto wallet allowing users to store various cryptocurrencies.
In March, cybercriminals stole about $197 million from crypto lending platform Euler Finance. According to De.FI, the $2 billion in crypto hacking this year, “though dispersed across various incidents, underscores the persistent vulnerabilities and challenges within the DeFi ecosystem.”
“2023 stood as a testament to both the ongoing vulnerabilities and the strides made in addressing them, even as interest in the space was relatively muted by the ongoing bear market in the first half of the year,” De.Fi wrote in its report shared with news publication TechCrunch.
Over $7 billion in cryptocurrency has been illicitly laundered through cross-chain crime, which is a kind of cryptocurrency swapping between different tokens or blockchains—often in rapid succession and with no legitimate business purpose—to obfuscate their criminal origin.
According to the report, North Korea”s Lazarus Group has been linked to the theft of around $900 million between July 2022 and July of this year.
