Bad actors on the cryptocurrency field are the nightmare to the sector, since 2011 this criminals have been stealing from people and exchanges more than $7 billions accordingly to a report from an Amsterdam based blockchain analytics firm dubbed Crystal Blockchain.
The news was noticed by the multimedia crypto firm Coindesk, who also noted that all of those loses of astonishing crypto assets are coming from hackers and scammers in the cryptocurrency environment. This thieves caused prejudice to the field in more than $7B and if the exchange firms don't take serious measures of security to block their intents the number could increase more in the coming years.
Hackers have stolen $2.8B exploiting security breaches and their preferred victims are cryptocurrency exchanges, accordingly to the Firm Crystal Blockchain was found 113 attacks of this kind and the biggest incident reported was from Coincheck security breach two years ago in 2018 when hackers had access to more than $500M worth in NEM coins. This method of attacks have found many firms unprepared to face the sophistication of the hackers on their exploit, companies from United States, UK, South Korea, China and Japan are the most attacked just to note, United States based crypto exchanges have been exploit 13 times and are the country in the first place on the hackers list.
Largest scams such as Onecoin, who promised to be the number one project that could even take the Bitcoin down, caused victims worldwide and in the end run away with $4 billions in clients funds, being one of the biggest scams ever on the crypto space.
Ponzi schemes also defrauded people and caused several victims, with the PlusToken scam in 2019 leading the way in with more than $2.9B stolen from customers. Customers in China mainland suffered the most with this scheme, with thousands of users losing their life savings. The WoToken linked to PlusToken scam also break down some pockets stealing $1B from users, this two scams combined just stole almost $4B in funds from customers.
Also to put in mind that the exchanges that were hacked during this time presented a low security level, neither to withdrawals also to verification only asking for a email or just a phone number, their negligence on this aspects caused a lot of losses and hackers exploited them to access customers funds.
The industry of crypto is evolving daily and hackers are becoming more sophisticated in their methods of attacks, many of this criminals invest a lot of money to have the right tools to break even the most secure system of protection on the exchange companies. They exploit vulnerabilities every day and when they found breaches they access them and steal funds, causing astonishing prejudice to the company involved in the incident.
Recently we saw the case of Kucoin exchange where hackers had access to a leaked private key and stole from the platform more than $280M in customers assets, fortunately the company managed to track those funds and recovered almost 84% of the total stolen value worth $236M. Other companies that suffered similar attacks didn't have that luck, with Bitfinex, Upbit and Binance losing several quantities of funds to hackers in the past years, even promising rewards for letting them know who hacked them and put in contact with were unable to recover the money.
It's necessary to invest more and higher on security systems to fight against hackers who are evolving the same way the most tech companies are, negligence on security can cause this Platforms to lose large quantities of assets in perjury and even take down an exchange, in the past MT.Gox close the doors due to a hacking which take them to declare bankruptcy but until today they are facing charges on the court with customers fighting to get back their money.
One thing is certain, as the industry grows also the number of hackers will grow, it's necessary to take security very seriously and enhance more security measures to verification level and withdrawals from customers.
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Man, It is crazy to think that 7 billion has disappeared over 9 years, and it hasn't affected the market enough to slow the insane pace we are on