Crypto thefts fall 48% month over month to $79 million in March

Crypto hacks saw a consecutive monthly decline, with malicious players stealing roughly $79 million from decentralized finance projects in March.

The fall represents a 48% decrease from the $160 million stolen in February.

Blockchain security firm CertiK stated:

“Combining all the incidents in March, we’ve confirmed [approximately] $79 million lost to exploits, hacks and scams after $69 million was returned.”

A breakdown of the incidents showed that targeted exploits on protocols resulted in the highest losses, totaling $52.1 million.

This was followed by flash loan attacks and phishing incidents, which resulted in cumulative losses of approximately $43 million. Additionally, exit scams resulted in a loss of $5.7 million.

Major thefts

According to CertiK, Prisma Finance lost the most significant amount in March. The project was a victim of a flash loan attack that resulted in a loss of around $12.4 million.

The perpetrator, self-proclaimed as a white-hat, vowed to restore the stolen funds after an online conference held by the project’s team. During the event, the hacker demands that the project’s team disclose their identities and issue a public apology.

Meanwhile, another major incident during the month was the $10 million stolen from NFPrompt, a content generation platform.

Other significant incidents from the month involve the NFT Platform Remilia and Web3 gaming platform Super Sushi Samurai, which lost approximately $4.7 million and $4.6 million, respectively.

Asset return

Amid a decline in theft activities, asset returns have surged. According to CertiK’s data, owners have reclaimed about $69.2 million, a substantial rise from the $7.8 million returned in February.

Notably, one of the headline-grabbing asset returns occurred on the Ethereum layer-2 network Blast-based gaming platform Munchables. The project’s core developer cum North Korean attacker voluntarily returned the $62 million stolen from the platform without demanding any ransom.

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