PeckShield counted 55 major crypto hacks in September, totaling $766.49 million in losses.
That’s about 462 percent more than August’s $136.3 million, and two incidents account for almost all of that.
Two breaches dominate the month
The Bitget incident, amounting to approximately $387 million, and the Liquid Network theft of approximately $320 million, of which $285 million was returned, are now PeckShield’s largest and second largest crypto thefts of the year to date. note. They surpassed the Drift and KelpDAO/LayerZero exploits. But remove those and the remaining 53 hacks total about $59 million, less than half of August’s total.
As CryptoPotato As reported earlier, Bitget said its security systems flagged unauthorized transfers from parts of its hot wallets at 6:31 p.m. UTC on September 24. CEO Gracy Chen explained that the attacker broke into a core system of the wallet infrastructure, spoofed transaction data, and tricked the authorization process to release funds.
The CEO ruled out a private key compromise and noted that cold wallets, which hold most of the exchange’s assets, were not affected. The exchange plans to cover the loss through its User Protection Fund, which holds more than $464 million.
“We will not run from this and every dollar will be counted,” Chen wrote on X.
Liquid Network’s loss came earlier, on September 6, when alleged white hat hackers withdrew around 4,000 BTC from Liquid Federation’s wallet. The withdrawal used the SideSwap authorization key, although Liquid noted that the key itself was not compromised.
In chain messages to Blockstream, the hacker promised to return the money once each node was patched. Charles Guillemet, Ledger’s CTO, was skeptical, pointing out that legitimate security researchers typically wouldn’t dump a deck and then request to be contacted on-chain.
Laundering trail and lower losses
SlowMist wrote in a September 29 update that North Korea-linked hackers are laundering stolen Bitget funds by matching CoW protocol orders to Chainflip deposit addresses, converting the proceeds to BTC, and then using CoinJoin to hide the movements.
Cos, the founder of SlowMist, argued that anti-money laundering controls lagged behind automated scripts. Chainflip attempts to block flows and has rejected at least one deposit but refunded the money instead of freezing it.
The other eight entries in PeckShield’s top 10 ranged from $3.15 million to $7.81 million. The biggest was a front-run involving the MEV robot “yoink,” which was fired.
Payment Processor V2, the LimitBreak contract at the center of a white hat bailout on September 25, was worth $6.6 million, including $3.4 million returned. During this operation, security researcher Quit moved 23,155 NFTs worth nearly $6 million out of exposed wallets, while a separate mining path left 660WETH unrecovered.
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