The ‘lowest monthly amount’ in 2022 for crypto theft was $62 million, according to CertiK.

According to CertiK (1), December saw the fewest significant cases of stolen cryptocurrencies in 2022, around 23 in total.

Companies are affected

$62.2 million worth of cryptocurrencies were stolen in December, the “lowest monthly amount” of the year according to CertiK, which says the 2022 holiday season may have reduced cryptocurrency hackers and exploits. On December 31, the blockchain security firm tweeted a list of the most prominent attacks that occurred that day. According to the report, the top-grossing approach this month was exit fraud at $15.5 million, followed by flash credit-based exploits at $7.6 million.

A follow-up tweet on January 1 stated that the 23 largest exploits on December 2 accounted for approximately $15 million in Helio Protocol events, accounting for 98.5% of the $62.2 million total. Ankr Reward Bearing Staked When a trader took advantage of the price difference in BNB (NBC) to borrow millions of dollars worth of HAY, the protocol that governs the stablecoin HAY (HAY) was lost.

Existing vulnerabilities

The decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Ankr experienced a different vulnerability at the time, resulting in an attacker creating 20 trillion APNBC and devaluing the protocol. Due to Helio traders hastily depositing NBC tokens, the loan was significantly reduced, which caused the protocol to lose money and its stablecoin to debug. The second major event of the month was the $12.9 million theft of Defrost Finance’s v1 and v2 systems. On December 23, he used the Flash Loan attack to destroy v2 protocols by introducing a false network token and a malicious pricing oracle.

While the money for the v2 attack has yet to be recovered, the hacker sent the money taken from the v1 protocol back to an address owned by Defrost a few days after the exploit. CertiK classified the issue as “exit fraud” due to the need for an administrator key to execute the attack. Defrost denied claims that the key was hacked.

December’s total is significantly lower than the previous month, representing an 89.5% drop from the $595 million in exploits spread across 36 major events CertiK detected in November 2022 — marred by the $477 million breach of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. The year’s ten biggest exploits combined for 2022 transferred $2.1 billion to malicious actors, mostly via cross-blockchain bridges and DeFi protocols.