The four major hacker attacks in the currency circle in 2022
In 2022, the use of loopholes to make profits will mainly focus on decentralized finance. Of the US$1.3 billion stolen in the first three months of 2022, approximately 97% came from decentralized financial platforms. By the end of 2022, cybercriminals had stolen more than $3 billion from the cryptocurrency community, with $718 million stolen from decentralized finance protocols in October alone, the month with the most losses.
One of the main targets of criminals is cross-chain bridges, software that enables the transfer of funds between different blockchains.
The loss this time is as high as: 625 million US dollars
One of the early successful cryptocurrency products of 2022 is "Axie Infinity" invested by Andreessen Horowitz. This "play and earn" game allows users to earn NFTs and tokens. The mode has been criticized for its exploitative design, as many players come from countries like Vietnam and the Philippines for whom Axie Infinity has become a full-time job.
However, Axie Infinity's misery isn't over yet. Its developers built the game's economic system on the Ethereum blockchain, but Ethereum is not suitable for in-game microtransactions. Therefore, they developed Ronin, a forked sidechain of Ethereum that is more efficient. In March 2022, the cross-chain bridge between Ronin and Ethereum was hacked and more than $620 million was stolen. The game team was not aware of the attack until a user reported that he could not withdraw funds.
The game has not yet resumed operations, and the “play and earn” model is still questioned. Loss of $325 million
Wormhole is a cross-chain bridge that supports transferring funds between Ethereum and Solana. In February 2022, hackers stole over $320 million from Wrapped Ethereum (wETH). wETH supports converting Ether into other tokens and using them on other blockchains.
Cybercriminals exploited vulnerability to steal up to $190 million
A similar decentralized finance protocol, Nomad Bridge, suffered a hacker attack in August 2022, but this attack was different from the attack suffered by Wormhole because the perpetrator of the attack was not a specific group, but hundreds of individuals. . Although the hacker returned 5% in the end, he still lost 1.$8.2 billion
