Report: Crypto Losses Drop 87% in February, But Hackers Are Now Targeting People, Not Code

A report by blockchain security firm Nominis shows that in February, total losses from crypto attacks fell by 87%, going from $385 million in January to $49.3 million last month. However, while the drop in total value stolen suggests improved protocol security, Nominis claims that a closer examination of the month’s events shows that attackers are moving their focus away from exploiting code and toward manipulating the people who use it. The Anatomy of February’s Crypto Attacks According to the Nominis report, an attack on Step Finance, a Solana-based decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, caused more than 60% of February’s total losses. In that case, attackers are said to have hacked devices belonging to the project’s executive team, which may have exposed private keys or allowed unauthorized transaction approvals. After that, they unstaked and moved 261,854 SOL worth up to $40 million from wallets that the project owned. The damage was so severe that Step Finance was forced to shut down its core platform and affiliated projects, including SolanaFloor and Remora Markets. The remaining losses came from a scattered mix of attacks, including $3 million lost by CrossCurve, a cross-chain protocol bridge, when an attacker exploited flawed validation logic in the contract responsible for processing incoming messages from the Axelar network. Elsewhere, YieldBlox, a DeFi lending platform, lost about $10.2 million after a bad actor changed its collateral pricing logic so that it could borrow more than it was allowed to. There were also several address poisoning scams targeting individuals, with their losses ranging from about $100,000 to nearly $600,000. Others were drained after unknowingly signing malicious token approval transactions. This is a method in which a fake prompt tricks people into giving criminals permission to take money from their wallets. A Broader Pattern is Emerging Apart from the direct attacks, there were also several notable findings made in Februar...