Millions in Cryptos Stolen by Criminals Attacking Individual Investors

In the growing industry of a new form of finance, we also see growth in all other aspects related to it. One such is cybercrime, and the crypto market is taking a severe hit from it.

The New Wave of Cybercrime

In a report from Chainalysis, these crypto-criminals developed methods of hacking came to light. Now hacks and attacks on exchanges and DeFi protocols are known and usually since they have a significant social media presence, they tend to be noticed and fixed sooner or later.

However, there are some who manage to escape thanks to the unconventional methods of hacking. Using methods like Cryptojacking, Clipping, etc. these criminals can target smaller traders or holders and steal little amounts of money.

Multiply this method to thousands or millions of people and you get stolen funds running up to millions of dollars.

The most widely used method is Cryptojacking and it amounts to up to 73% of the total steal by hackers.

However, instead of directly stealing money from them, they steal computing power from their victims. Using it they illicitly mine cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Ethereum but the most mined altcoin is Monero. 

According to Chainalysis, the reason why it’s more difficult to identify these Cryptojackers is that,

“Since funds are moving directly from the mempool to mining addresses unknown to us, rather than from the victim’s wallet to a new wallet, it’s more difficult to passively collect data on cryptojacking activity”

Furthermore, most of these illicitly mined cryptocurrencies are sent to different platforms from where they are liquidated for money. In 2021 about 54% of the funds were sent to exchanges, And another 20% of them were deposited into DeFi protocols.

Additionally, Illicit services also received a significant 15% of the stolen funds which is related mostly to the darknet markets which is a major money-laundering avenue for malware operators.

Another successful Clipper, Hackboss, managed to drain over $560k from crypto holders by essentially “inserting its own addresses into the clipboard when victims attempt to copy and paste another address to carry out a cryptocurrency transaction”, stated Chainalysis.

Would This Continue Going Forward?

There is a very high chance that such crypto-attacks would further flare up in the future given the immense growth the crypto market is witnessing.

Throughout 2021, the total market cap of the entire crypto market shot up by 201.97% amassing more than $1.505 trillion. Thus, such growth serves as a lucrative opportunity for cybercriminals.