Results of 2024 in terms of the number of hacker attacks in crypto. How many coins did the attackers steal?

How much cryptocurrency did hackers steal?

The number of cryptocurrency hacks has increased sharply in the past few days, driven by the market’s rising capitalization after Bitcoin’s price surpassed $100,000 for the first time on December 6.

In total, hackers caused more than $2.3 billion in damage to the industry across 165 recorded incidents. This amount is 40 percent higher than in 2023, when the total theft was $1.69 billion.

Deddy Lavid, co-founder and CEO of Cyvers, commented on the data in an interview with Сointelegraph journalists. Here is his response on the matter.

These incidents were often made possible by compromised private keys and weak key management systems, as demonstrated by the results of high-profile hacker attacks.

And while the number of thefts is increasing, the $2.36 billion figure is still 37 percent lower than the record $3.78 billion recorded in 2022. Looking at the statistics in more detail, crypto platform access control vulnerabilities accounted for $1.9 billion in losses, or more than 81 percent of the total losses in 2024.

Smart contract vulnerabilities were the second-largest cause of losses, resulting in $456 million in thefts across 98 incidents, or 19 percent of total losses.

To avoid further multi-billion dollar losses in 2025, the industry needs to focus on stronger security measures, including private key management using offline storage and threat monitoring systems, Lavid said.

Thanks to it, sensitive combinations do not leave the devices and are used to sign transactions in an isolated environment. This makes it impossible to extract private keys online.

In addition, in the field of cybersecurity, it is worth paying special attention to the threat from North Korean hackers. As it became known yesterday, they account for the majority of stolen crypto funds throughout the year.

Hacken experts also shared their observations on the activity of attackers . According to them, the decentralized finance (DeFi) sphere lost 40 percent fewer coins from 2023 to 2024 due to improved protocols, more reliable blockchain bridges, and advanced cryptographic measures in cyber defense.

In the centralized platform (CeFi) sector, the number of hacking incidents more than doubled over the same period, with losses rising to $694 million. Centralized exchanges have become prime targets for access control vulnerabilities and other critical security risks.

The findings of the Hacken report demonstrate a significant difference between the spheres of centralized and decentralized finance. Although, as we found out yesterday, platforms from both categories can quite well coexist with each other. At the same time, the number of popular platforms will decrease over time.

For example, experts have recorded a sharp decline in financial losses in 2024 for decentralized finance: from $787 million in 2023 to $474 million this year. The report notes that the volume of losses from blockchain-bridge-related hacker attacks has significantly decreased. The figure has decreased from $338 million in 2023 to $114 million in 2024.

The performance of the centralized finance industry in 2024 stands in stark contrast to the improvements seen in DeFi. Since 2023, financial losses in the industry have more than doubled to $694 million. The sharp increase in hacks is largely due to vulnerabilities in wallet access control, with notable incidents such as the DMM hack in Q2 and the WazirX hack in Q3 2024.


These statistics once again remind us that the success of long-term cryptocurrency investments primarily depends on the security of the coins. Still, there are more than enough people who want to steal digital assets. Therefore, buyers should not only pay attention to studying the advantages of a particular project, but also understand the features of seed phrases and the rules for storing them.