By Richard Hines
Hacktober, a mocking phrase coined from hackers and October, denotes a series of hack attacks that occurred throughout the month of October. The hacking trail totaled $3 billion dollars obtained by hackers and lost by crypto businesses.
Hacktober, A Month Of Cyber Hacks
October brought losses ranging from account hacks to bug issues and overall financial losses. A total of 44 exploits had a significant impact on crypto companies, resulting in over $600 million in losses.
However, a sliver of paradise was reclaimed when some hackers bargained with several firms and returned some of the money while walking away with a significant sum of $100 million from these attacks.
Hacktober, as it is popularly known, saw twice as many crypto attacks as this time last year.
This hack was carried due to a variety of reasons, including wallet compromise via a profanity tool hack. A profanity tool is a program that can generate several wallet addresses and exploit the vulnerability of its private keys for the purpose of hacking.
Other reasons included inadequately secured smart contract code, which led to rewriting smart contract and distributing funds to hackers; also cross-chain bridges, and price manipulation.
Crypto Firms Hack Occurrences
A recent alarming incident occurred when hackers stole $100 million from BNB owing to a vulnerability in the blockchain cross-chain system. This was handled by BNB performing a network hard fork to restore security.
Mango Market, a crypto lending platform, was also hacked, resulting in a loss of approximately $100 million. Despite the fact that the hacker later became recognized and negotiated a deal with the corporation, he walked away with $47 million and left $67 million after claiming his acts were legitimate.
The Defi Platform, Wintermute, was not spared as this hacker stole over $160 million from this platform. This case was initially classified as a whitehat case, while the firm waited to hear back from the hacker they assured investors that this loss was more of a pinch and that their funds were secure.
FriesDao also lost $2.3 million owing to a profane breach on one of their less secure wallets, which could not be recovered.
Team Finance was hacked as a result of a bug in their recent shift from Version 2 to Version 3, resulting in the loss of $15.8 million in assets.
Many more cases of hacking have been recorded, with firms failing to retrieve payments from hackers.