Crypto losses fall to $29M in December marking 2024's lowest

In December 2024, losses from crypto hacks, scams, and exploits dropped significantly, reaching the lowest levels of the year.

Blockchain security firms CertiK and PeckShield reported a combined total of $29 million in crypto-related losses for the month.

CertiK recorded $28.6 million in losses, a sharp decline from November's $63.8 million and October's $115.8 million.

The majority of the losses, amounting to $26.7 million, came from exploits.

Two notable incidents were reported: a $2.1 million exploit of the decentralised finance (DeFi) platform GemPad, where attackers exploited a vulnerability in the platform’s smart contracts, and a $1 million loss from the FEG token bridge exploit.

The latter involved hackers draining tokens from the bridge contract without depositing them in the source chain due to a flaw in the cross-chain message verification process.

PeckShield reported $24.7 million in losses for December, marking a 71% decrease from the previous month.

The largest single incident involved the LastPass password management service, which suffered a breach on December 16 and 17.

Hackers drained $12.3 million from affected users, following a data breach in December 2022.

According to on-chain evidence, the attack resulted in the theft of significant amounts of crypto.

Other significant losses included the breach of DeFi protocol Yei Finance on December 2, which saw around $2.2 million taken.

For the year, Cyvers reported that $2.3 billion worth of crypto was stolen across 165 incidents in 2024.

This represents a 40% increase from 2023 but remains 37% below the $3.78 billion stolen in 2022.

The rise in thefts was attributed to a surge in access control breaches, especially within centralised exchanges and custodians.