August sees hacking attacks concentrated on DeFi with a loss of $23m.
Over $23m were lost to scams and fraud during the month of August, according to a report published by Immunfi, a blockchain security firm.
Close to $16m were stolen by hackers across 13 incidents, which make up 68% of the total incident count in August. The remaining 32% were 4 cases of fraud that saw a loss of $7.5m.
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The hackers seem to focus on decentralized networks, as all the attacks over the month were targeted at DeFi protocols. Ethereum suffered 5 attacks, and BNB Chain had to deal with 4.
Base, Coinbase’s Layer-2 solution that was launched on August 9th, suffered losses in 4 projects as well. A few more notable names are Optimism, Solana and Arbitrum.
This year, from January to August, the industry lost a total of $1.2bn to hacks and rug pulls.
Among the more notable cases, there’s the Exactly protocol incident that took place on August 18th. The hacker stole 4,323.6 ETH worth $7.2m and impacted those who engaged with the DebtManager. The attackers gained an opening by manipulating the periphery contract.
Another incident happened on August 25th, Magnate Finance rug pulled its users and drained the customer accounts of $6.4m by directly manipulating the price oracle. The rug pull was somewhat predicted by X (formerly Twitter) user who made a link between Magnate Finance and an older Solfire scam.
On the lower end of the spectrum is a hacking case involving Harbor protocol, which recorded a loss of $250,000.
Despite this, August suffered fewer damages than July, when the industry suffered a massive $486m loss.
