Hackers found the easiest way to steal cryptocurrency

In the first half of 2025, the crypto industry suffered record losses from hackers and fraudsters — more than $ 2.47 billion was stolen through hacks, scams, and phishing attacks, according to CertiK. This amount has already exceeded the entire volume of losses for 2024 and indicates that attackers are becoming more sophisticated and adaptive.

The largest incident occurred in February, when the Bybit exchange lost $ 1.4 billion in digital assets. This was the largest single hack in the history of cryptocurrencies and accounts for the bulk of this year’s losses. In the second quarter, the number of attacks and their value decreased slightly to about $ 800 million in 144 cases, but the overall trend points to a new record.

According to CertiK co-founder and Columbia University professor Zhonghui Gu, the fight against hackers is a «never-ending war.» As smart contracts and blockchains become more secure, attackers are increasingly targeting people who hold the keys. Last year, about half of the incidents were caused by operational errors, such as the loss or compromise of private keys.

Phishing scams demonstrate this vulnerability particularly vividly. In August, one investor lost $ 3 million in USDT after signing a malicious transaction, and another lost almost $ 900 thousand due to an unrevoked wallet authorization that had been in effect for more than a year.

Experts emphasize that there is a deep asymmetry in this struggle: developers have to protect millions of lines of code, while hackers only need to find one weak point. Given the growth rate of attacks, future hacks are likely to increasingly resemble psychological traps aimed at exploiting human errors rather than technical attacks on infrastructure.