
Despite the cryptocurrency industry being plagued by frequent hacks, the month of August witnessed a notable fall in the amount of crypto stolen through hacks and rug pulls, according to a recent report from bug bounty platform Immunefi.
In August, approximately $15 million in crypto was stolen, pushing the total amount lost in 2024 to just over $1.2 billion. Although this marks a 15 per cent increase in stolen crypto compared to 2023, these funds were dispersed across more than 150 incidents in the first eight months of 2024, Immunefi reported.
Most of this year's attacks have targeted DeFi, according to Immunefi's data, and were not due to code flaws or stolen private keys, the report said.
Instead, hackers have increasingly focused on BNB Chain, which has become the go-to blockchain ecosystem of choice for hackers looking to carry out targeted rug pull scams and other crypto heists, according to a separate Immunefi report released last month. The rise in rug pulls on BNB Chain has been fueled by forked code, following several recent hard forks — ZhangHeng, Plato, and Hertz — to mitigate the risk of future security breaches.
Despite these measures, BNB Chain has seen $1.64 billion stolen since its inception in 2017, a figure likely to grow as hackers continue to seek lucrative targets on the network.
Ethereum, another leading blockchain network, has also faced numerous hacks and scams, leading to substantial financial losses for its users.