This May 2024 was fairly tragic for the sphere of cryptocurrency as many hits occurred with numerous enterprises, becoming the subject of hacker attacks and resulting in multimillion losses. Blockchain research and security company CertiK has reported in its monthly report that a whopping $347.3 million was stolen in various cases of hacks, flash loan attacks, and other critics of exit scams.
Altogether, this article thoroughly describes the five main hacks that occurred during the given month and estimates the losses.
Losses in May were largely attributed to various exploits, which stood at $324.7 million which had its major contributor, the DMM Bitcoin exchange hack. Crypto lost through Flash Loans was $20.7 Million and exit scams thus attributed to $1.8 million in losses.
The largest hack happened to the Japanese-based cryptocurrency exchange DMM Bitcoin when it was hacked on May 31. Hackers succeeded in stealing 4,502.9 BTC equal to approximately $305 million. The exchange detected the unauthorized transaction at around 1:26 p.m. and immediately introduced security adjustments such as suspending withdrawals and scrutinizing new accounts. DMM Bitcoin has moved down to ensure users that they will be indemnified with all the loss they have incurred through trading.
The Gala Games company faced a severe security violation, as a result of which $23M of the users’ assets were stolen. Specifically, the company’s CEO, Eric Schiermeyer, admitted to internal control failures as the root of the problem and vowed to enhance the security measures. Most of the stolen assets have been retrieved by Gala Games with support from the police and cooperation partners.
Sonne Finance of DeFi industry lost around $21 million after it was attacked by a flash loan. Crooks were able to use the flaws in the systems’ smart contracts to manipulate the price of the assets to steal from them. Currently, Sonne Finance is in touch with security Companies to rectify the bug and get back the lost amount.
Another DeFi platform, Alex Labs was hacked in a well-orchestrated attack that saw the project lose 4.4 million. Various attempts were made by the hackers to breach the security systems of the online platforms and make away with the money. This platform has closed down the activities and is doing security investigations to avoid such incidents again in the future.
Pump.fun lost $2 million via an exploit. Some instances saw the thieves take advantage of the flaws prevalent in the platform’s code and siphoned off money. Help in is now working with cybersecurity companies in order to improve its protection services.
