Hacks Cost Crypto $2.9B in 2024

Hackers in the blockchain industry stole more than $2.9 billion in 2024, with Centralized Finance (CeFi) projects accounting for the biggest losses.
Those numbers were fairly stable from last year, with about $2.3 billion lost if phishing attacks are excluded, according to blockchain security firm Hacken’s 2024 Web3 Security Report.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) was the biggest winner, with losses dropping 40% year-over-year to $474 million, while CeFi losses more than doubled to $700 million.
Centralized exchanges were hit hard, with just two exploits netting hackers more than $500 million. Those were the $305 million DMM Bitcoin hack in May and the $290 million WazirX hack in July.
“Access control attacks consistently ranked as the dominant threat across every category of Web3, underscoring their pervasive threat for every project,” the report said. “This reduction is largely attributed to the growing adoption of rigorous security audits and bug bounty programs, which are increasingly becoming standard components of DeFi project security roadmaps.”
The gaming/metaverse space had its own catastrophe with the $290 million PlayDapp hack.
Better Bridges
A big reason for DeFi’s gains was the growing reliability of bridges, which had been its biggest Achilles’ heel, with losses dropping from $1.9 billion in 2022 to just $114 million in 2024.

Bridges are incorporating better security features like multi-party computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography. As a result, they are not only tougher nuts to crack, but they are also being targeted less, the report said.
Even DeFi was hammered by access control losses, which accounted for 50% of its losses. That said, the $219 million in access control losses was down from $339 million in 2023.

Yet CeFi losses surged, more than doubling from $339 million in 2023 to $694 million in 2024, the report said.
Private Key Calamities
The biggest failures this year were in the area of private key compromises and other access control hacks, Hacken found.
These amounted to $1.72 billion, almost 60% of the $2.9 billion crypto lost to thieves this year.
As a percentage of overall hacks the numbers were worse, with access control accounting for 78% of losses with phishing excluded.
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