DeFi security sees a 40% drop in losses as CeFi faces a $694M surge in breaches

According to the Hacken Web 3 Report 2024, Decentralized finance protocols’ losses have dropped considerably by 40% year-on-year. However, the same cannot be said for centralized finance protocols, whose losses have more than doubled in the past year.

Hacken’s report shows that DeFi losses represented 20.4% of the total crypto hacks losses, while CeFi accounted for 30% in 2024. However, compared to last year, DeFi losses lessened by 40%, dropping from $787 million in losses to only $474 million in losses this year.

CeFi losses skyrocket to $694M in 2024

CeFi losses grew dramatically, rising to $694 million from $339 million in 2023. The DMM Bitcoin hack in May 2024 stood out as the largest CeFi breach, with losses reaching approximately $305 million. About 4502.9 BTC was transferred to an unknown wallet, before being redistributed to other addresses. 

Another major CeFi hack, the WazirX hack, accounted for 42.8% of Q3 crypto losses, with nearly $240 million siphoned. An attacker breached their system, acquiring signatures from three WazirX signers and one from Liminal, enabling them to upgrade the wallet to a malicious contract and drain the funds.

Despite the DeFi sector achievements, some protocols were still heavily affected by hackers’ exploits including Radiant Capital. The DeFi firm lost over $55 million after a hacker gained access to their system using some malware, manipulating legitimate transaction approvals, and bypassing the protections of hardware wallets.

Over $1.7 billion was lost to access control exploits in 2024

Over $2.3 billion has been drained by hackers from the crypto space in 2024. Both the DeFi and CeFi sectors were heavily hit by access control vulnerabilities. 

Access control exploits accounted for 75% of all crypto hack losses and nearly half of all DeFi losses, draining more than $1.7 billion.

In addition, phishing scams drained over $600 million in 2024. Most of them were a combination of inclusive celebrity-endorsed rug pulls and presale scams. 

Hacken’s report even highlights that hacks and breaches across crypto and metaverse platforms persisted into 2024, due to weaknesses in private key management systems, poor security measures, single-signature vulnerabilities, and insecure private key backups.