Hackers and fraudsters managed to steal more than $2 billion from Web3 projects in the first half of 2022, already more than the amount lost for the entire year of 2021.
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A report from CertiK found that while virus attacks, hacks , scams , phishing , identity theft , and other social engineering attacks are all quite popular among threat actors, there is a new growing threat that has become a monster – flash loan attacks.
This is what happened with the Beanstalk protocol in April 2022. Entities with large amounts of BEAN tokens gain voting rights, allowing them to vote on important events, such as capital withdrawals. With the help of a flash loan, an attacker was able to acquire large amounts of BEAN and then use their “newfound voting power” to vote in favor of withdrawing almost $200 million from the protocol.
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According to CertiK, there were 27 flash loan attacks in the second quarter of 2022, resulting in losses of $308 million – but just a few months earlier, “only” $14 million had been lost this way.
Analysts also say that phishing attacks increased between the two quarters, from 106 in the first quarter to 290 in the second quarter.
Most often, attackers attempted to compromise endpoints via Discord , as this is one of the most popular social networking platforms for crypto and Web3 developers
“Rug pulls,” a practice in which “developers” would “pull the rug” on investors and disappear with money , seems to be losing popularity. One of the reasons why rug pulls are no longer so popular is the deep bear market that is currently taking place.
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Despite the good news, more than $37 million was lost this way in the second quarter of this year (a 16% drop quarter-over-quarter).
Information source: techradar.com
