Crypto exploits and attacks on various DeFi projects and exchanges are one of the downsides of the crypto market. Malicious actors are using various methods to get ahold of users’ money and run for it – stealing private keys, flashloan attacks, and exploiting backdoors in the protocol’s code to get access to the funds. Today, we will explore the top cryptocurrency hacks https://www.apostro.xyz/hacks that happened in the past.
Mt Gox
The Mt Gox crypto hack back in 2014 became a major event in the history of cryptocurrencies. It had a significant impact on the cryptocurrency market and the aftereffects still influence the crypto world.
A large number of customers lost substantial amounts of money. Approximately 650,000 BTC were stolen from the company. At the time, the exchange was valued at $450 million. However, the majority of the lost BTC was not recovered. While it was a massive security breach, there was no definitive answer to the cause of the hack. Several potential causes were investigated, including an inside job.
The customers of the exchange are still waiting for the reimbursement – almost 10 years after the exploit itself.
Wormhole protocol
The Wormhole protocol is a DeFi protocol that allows users to move tokens between different chains. In other words, it acts as a bridge. While bridges are essential for cross-chain interactions, keeping them secure is more complicated than one might think as they need to take into account the codebases of various chains.
The Wormhole has also suffered due to security issues, resulting in the theft of roughly $325 million in Ethereum. While it’s not the largest crypto hack to date, it’s certainly one the most extensive. The exploit happened over a series of three transactions, with hacker bypassing the bridge verification and making it mint 120,000 wETH by sending a malicious message to the code. He then swapped stolen assets to both ETH and SOL.
The DAO
The DAO breach had an impact comparable to Mt Gox, causing havoc in the market and among the community. The DAO raised more than $150 million from over 11,000 investors, making it one of the largest crowdfunding projects at the time. However, there were weaknesses in the DAO’s smart contracts that allowed malicious actors to take advantage of the platform and steal the funds.
The Ethereum community was in chaos as they deliberated on how to respond to the attack. Failure of the DAO would not only result in financial losses for investors but would also have major implications for the Ethereum network, which was still in its early stages. The community chose to hard fork the network after much deliberation. The hard fork effectively reset the Ethereum network’s history to before The DAO attack and reallocated The DAO’s ETH to a different smart contract, allowing investors to withdraw their funds. This was a sensitive issue; after all, blockchains are supposed to be immutable and resistant to censorship.
