Report Reveals That Hackers Stole $900 Million From Crypto Exchanges Since 2016

In a recently conducted research, Group-IB, a cybersecurity company based in Moscow, discovered that crypto exchanges have lost a whopping $882 million worth of digital assets to hackers since 2016. This trend is expected to persist because the criminals have diverted their attention to digital trading platforms. On average, cybercriminals make away with $1.3 million in virtual currencies on a daily basis.

The biggest contributor to the aforementioned figure is the attack on the Japan-based crypto exchange, Coincheck. Earlier this year, cybercriminals stole $532 million worth of NEM tokens form Coincheck. In second place is the attack on the Italy-based BitGrail, where $170 million worth of NANO was stolen. Other platforms that were victims of hacking theft incidences are Zaif, Bithumb, EtherDelta, and many more. A majority of these attacks were perpetrated by the notorious hacker groups such as Cobalt, Silence, Lazarus, and MoneyTaker.

As mentioned earlier, Group-IB indicated that the number of attacks is likely to increase in the future. This is because hackers are expected to shift their focus to exchange platforms which are deemed vulnerable.

In addition, the hackers also stole 10% of the funds raised through ICO token sales. Most of the attacks on ICOs were conducted through phishing. For this reason, Group-IB encouraged investors to avoid sharing their information with unknown parties. Nonetheless, the attacks on ICOs are also exacted to increase in the future.

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