DeFi Hacks and Heists in History

Blockchain is currently mostly used in various private virtual currency fields, and many hacking incidents also occur in these scenarios. The blockchain itself can ensure that the accounting content is foolproof, but it is almost always anonymous, so whoever seizes the account text can claim to be the owner. However, private companies have different anti-hack conditions on servers for saving accounts, which makes such “robbery” happen from time to time.

In this article, I will introduce some famous hack events.

2018

In January, the Japanese digital currency exchange Coincheck was hacked, and about $534 million worth of NEM was illegally transferred on the platform.

On February 11, the Italian cryptocurrency exchange BitGrail was hacked, and about $170 million worth of NANO was stolen.

On April 22, there was a major loophole in the BeautyChain smart contract. Hackers used this loophole to generate tokens indefinitely, causing the value of BEC to return to zero.

On April 25, SmartMesh had a suspected major security breach and announced that it would suspend all SMT transactions and transfers until further notice, resulting in a loss of about $140 million.

On July 10, the Israeli digital currency exchange Bancor was hacked, and about more than $2.35 billion worth of ETH, NPXS, and BNT were illegally transferred on the platform.

On July 25, the game contract of the EOS Fomo 3D werewolf game suffered an overflow attack, and 60,686 EOS were stolen from the reward pool, resulting in some rewards not rewarding users according to the game rules. After the EOS Core Arbitration Forum (ECAF) arbitrated the hacker, the hacker’s EOS account was frozen: eosfomoplay1.

On September 20, the Japanese digital currency exchange Zaif was hacked, resulting in a loss of 6.7 billion yen (about 60 million US dollars in cryptocurrency), including 5,966 bitcoins. [6] According to a CNN report, about $40 million of the stolen money belonged to customer funds, and another 20 million belonged to the exchange.

On December 3, EOS Dice3D hacked and lost 10,569 EOS. The hacker transferred the stolen EOS to Huobi, and Dice3D officials decided to give some EOS to the players as compensation at their own expense.

2019

On February 22, EOS42 was attacked by hackers. The hackers exploited the vulnerability that the EOS node did not update the blacklist to attack the system, causing EOS42 to lose 2 million EOS. After this security incident, the EOS community began to take precautionary measures to avoid similar situations from happening again.

On March 30, South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb was hacked, and assets of more than 3 million EOS (about $12.7 million) and 20 million XRP (about $6.2 million) were stolen.

On May 8, Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, announced that it had been hacked and a total of 7,000 bitcoins were stolen, with an estimated loss of more than $40 million.

On July 12, BitPoint, a legal cryptocurrency exchange certified by the Japan Financial Services Agency, was stolen thousands of bitcoins, with a total loss of 3.5 billion yen in various cryptocurrencies. The Bibao Taiwan branch has also completely suspended services from July 23. All users cannot trade cryptocurrencies, and even their accounts in Taiwan dollars cannot be withdrawn.

Continuous update….

If you want to learn more about DeFi hack events, please follow this account.