Hacking cryptocurrency platforms has become a full-time job for hackers. Why?

Hackers do pose a serious risk to digital asset holders. The former especially often use the so-called blind signature of transactions. This involves confirming transactions, all the details of which the coin owner does not understand – instead, he sees only a long hash of letters and numbers.

In this way, fraudsters can force the victim to unknowingly grant permission to withdraw cryptocurrencies and tokens from the wallet. For example, this is required when trading on decentralized exchanges, when the platform sends new assets to the address and at the same time takes other coins involved in the transaction.

And if the user falls for this trick and confirms the malicious operation, all of his crypto can be instantly sent to the scammers’ wallets.

Is it possible to protect yourself from this? Yes. First of all, it is advisable to ignore the signature of transactions whose essence you do not understand. It is also important to use a combination of cold storage with isolation from the Internet and a hot wallet, which is always online.

That is, we store most of our coins on hardware wallets from Ledger, Trezor and other manufacturers. The trick is to use these devices only for receiving and sending coins, ignoring any smart contracts and platforms from the decentralized finance sphere. In this way, we protect ourselves from the risks in case of hacking of such a platform in the future.

A relatively small amount can be kept in a hot wallet like Phantom and MetaMask, which will be used to interact with decentralized applications. Even if such a wallet is hacked, the loss from this will be small.

How money is stolen from crypto wallets

Mitchell Amador, founder of security platform ImmuneFi, detailed the crypto scam activity during a keynote at Web Summit 2024. He said that hacking decentralized finance protocols is “definitely a sustainable and viable business” today.

However, the coin industry itself is generally becoming safer, as the share of losses due to scammer activity is decreasing one way or another, Decrypt reports .

Hackers are now targeting the cryptocurrency industry with more damage than ever before, but their skills can be applied to other areas, Amador notes. That is, even if scammers fail to make a significant haul from hacks over a period of time, they can still pursue miner-extractable value (MEV) or monetize their skills in other ways.

However, on a general scale, crypto is becoming safer. Here, Amador referred to a report from colleagues at ImmuneFi on the results of the third quarter of 2024. They determined that losses from hacks in the crypto industry fell by 38 percent compared to the same quarter last year to the 424 million mark.

At the same time, the overall result in 2024 exceeded the $1 billion mark. For comparison: the figure in 2022 was $3 billion, and in 2023 – $1.8 billion. Here is a quote from an expert on this matter.

All this is despite the growing value of the industry as a whole, as well as the increasing value of assets within the blockchain. That is, on a per capita basis, the amount of risk per dollar of value is rapidly falling. And while we are seeing more hacks, there are fewer major incidents.

As an example, Amador recalled the recent Radiant Capital hack in October 2024, which allegedly netted North Korean hackers $50 million. He continues.

They hunted for victims’ private keys by hacking into the devices at the core of the system and forging transaction details in a rather strange form of man-in-the-middle attack that is highly exotic in itself.

The security expert notes that hackers are increasingly turning to so-called social engineering to hack DeFi protocols. One way or another, people are always the weakest link in the hacker chain of activity.

Amador also recalled Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in November 2024. According to the ImmuneFi representative, the politician’s support for the coin industry will definitely benefit the niche. In addition, the reputation of cryptocurrencies will be significantly improved.

This seems to have a huge net benefit to the industry in terms of overall growth and friendliness, which in turn will encourage more security experts to become active.

And then, in time, hackers reminded the Cardano cryptocurrency community of themselves. On Sunday, the official Twitter of this platform was hacked, The Block reports .

First, they announced the alleged launch of the ADA cryptocurrency based on the Solana network under the ticker $ADASOL. As noted in the announcement, the project was supposed to combine the capabilities of Cardano “with the speed and innovation of Solana.”

The scammers published a whole thread of thirteen messages explaining the essence of the new project. Moreover, they found a place to mention a recent podcast from the Cardano Foundation, which allegedly recalled this project. In other words, the scammers tried to pass off what was happening as a real event.


According to DexScreener, the fraudulent token reached $500,000 in trading volumes before traders stopped interacting with it.


An hour later, the messages were deleted. Instead, the scammers published another fake – this time about the alleged filing of a lawsuit by the Securities and Exchange Commission against the Cardano team. Apparently, in this way they wanted to cause a collapse of the ADA rate and make money on it through short positions.


Unfortunately, scammers will always be present in the crypto industry, and their methods will become increasingly difficult. Therefore, investors need to follow industry trends to understand possible scam scenarios. In addition, one should always exercise caution and ignore suspicious links and any such offers.