According to Cointelegraph: The year 2023 witnessed a loss of $1.8 billion to Web3 hackers and scammers, as per a report by the blockchain security platform, Immunefi, published on December 28th. The report claimed that the Lazarus Group, linked to North Korea, contributed to 17% of the total financial loss.
The largest hack of the year, in terms of monetary loss, was the exploit of the Mixin Network. The peer-to-peer trading platform reported losses exceeding $200 million. Following closely in the second position was the Euler Finance lending platform, suffering a $197 million exploit. Multichain, a cross-chain bridge protocol, suffered the third-largest hack of $126 million.
Roughly $309 million of the total losses are said to be allied with the Lazarus Group. This cybercriminal organization is tied to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). The Atomic Wallet hack ($100 million), CoinEx ($70 million), Alphapo ($60 million), Stake, CoinsPaid, among others, were all attributed to these losses.
Hack and exploit cases made up most of the losses, with a staggering $1.6 billion, while clearly identifiable fraud schemes like rug pulls accounted for only $103 million. Protocols purporting to be decentralized were responsible for the brunt of the losses at $1.3 billion. Centralized finance (CeFi) crypto protocols, conversely, reported $409 million in losses.
Compared to 2022, when blockchain security platform Chainalysis reported stolen funds exceeding $3.8 billion, the $1.8 billion in losses in 2023 represents a significant decline of more than 52%.