The 3 Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History!  (2022)

Let’s learn from the 3 Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History!  

Not just individual traders like us, but Millions in cryptocurrency are being stolen from well-known platforms and huge companies by hackers where victims left blindly notice.

#1 Ronin Network, 2022, $614m

The biggest cryptocurrency hack of all time occurred on March 2022 to Ronin Network. This side chain network allows players of the Axie Infinity videogame to exchange their in-game tokens for other cryptocurrencies.

Estimated Hacked Volume

• 173,600 Ethereum 
• 25.5m USDC

*Using the conversion rate at the time, this values the heist at $614m.

Sky Mavis, the company behind Axie Infinity, said it is working with “law enforcement officials, forensic cryptographers, and our investors to ensure there is no loss of user funds.

The investigation continues and found the root cause of the highest value crypto hack of all time — the platform was hacked with an elaborate phishing scheme involving fake LinkedIn. 

The US government identified the hackers as the North Korean group Lazarus, which targeted Axie Infinity Sky Mavis employees. They reportedly reached out over LinkedIn on behalf of a fake company. When employees took the bait, they proceeded with multiple rounds of fake job interviews and an “extremely generous” fake compensation package. The con culminated in one senior engineer clicking a PDF supposedly containing the official offer. At that point, hackers first compromised the engineer’s computer—four of the nine nodes used to validate financial transactions on Sky Mavis’ Ronin blockchain.

#2 Poly Network Hack, $610M

Poly Network is a cross-chain network that enables blockchain users to exchange cryptocurrencies without a centralized platform. 

The platform works by building smart contracts.

The hacker gained “owner” access rights to one of Poly’s smart contracts by exploiting vulnerabilities in Poly’s systems by discovering the piggybank’s hidden function and using the Poly-ETH contract to give himself ownership rights to the piggybank. 

Then, he transferred $610  million worth of cryptocurrency to his wallets.

In a shocking turn of events, the hacker, dubbed “Mr. Whitehat,” began returning the stolen funds to Poly’s hot wallets, eventually returning the entire sum. He explained that the hack was “a joke” , and meant to encourage Poly Network to improve its security.” 

The company rewarded Mr. Whitehat with $500,000 as a bounty for discovering the bug and offered him a spot on its security team.  

#3 Coincheck Hack, $533M

In 2017, Coincheck, a Japanese exchange, had lost 532 million NEM (also known as XEM) tokens worth $534 million. They found a malicious entity transferred over half a billion dollars worth of user NEM tokens from a compromised hot wallet to 11 external addresses. The hack went unnoticed till near midday.

To access its hot wallet, attackers sent phishing emails to Coincheck’s employees, using this to collect information they needed to install malware that would let them clean out Coincheck’s online NEM store.

In April 2018, Coincheck was sold to Monex Group, which soon began reimbursing customers affected by the hack with $0.83 for each NEM token lost. The company has since repaid all 260,000 customers who lost assets in the hack.

They also created an automated tagging system to track the coins and tag any account that receives them, effectively blocklisting the stolen tokens.

 

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