According to a report by global digital privacy and research group Top10VPN, the non-fungible token (NFT) hack caused losses of about $52 million in the first four months of 2022 alone, compared to less than $7 million in the whole of 2021.
After only one hack in the first half of 2021, which was reportedly due to individual users failing to enable multi-factor authentication rather than security issues on the Nifty Gateway platform, there have been around 40 more incidents since then.
Sports NFT platform Limpo suffered the most when it experienced a hot wallet security breach in January 2022 and lost $18.7 million worth of tokens.
Bored app Yacht Club, one of the most famous NFT projects, was hacked in April 2022, when its official Instagram account was compromised and used to send phishing messages. This resulted in an alleged $3 million worth of stolen NFTs.
While the concept of NFTs dates back to 2014, the market for such digital collections has exploded in popularity in no time, leaving financial speculators flush with the cryptocurrency. Platforms such as OpenC and Binance have emerged to facilitate lucrative trading in NFTs.
“With individual NFTs often changing hands for a million dollars or more, and sometimes even more, it is inevitable that the NFT ecosystem will become a target for hackers. We have found NFTs as early as 2021 Hacks may have started on the platform, targeting individual users for a few tens of thousands of dollars, less than a year after cybercriminals are now routinely making money with millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency,” Top10VPN said.
The report further states that the cryptocurrency itself, another highly lucrative blockchain-based technology, is at the center of another major cybersecurity trend in 2022.
Cryptojacking is the unauthorized use of victims’ devices for cryptojacking, usually following infection with malware.
The research found cryptojacking to be the fastest growing form of malware in 2022, leading to a cryptocurrency market that had a total value of over $2 trillion at the time of writing.
The average number of cryptojacking incidents in 2022 was 15.02 million per month, compared to 8.09 million per month in 2021, an increase of 86%.
The analysis, which is based on hacked intelligence data captured by firewall vendor SonicWall, shows that the growth of cryptojacking far exceeds the general trend for malware, up 16% so far in 2022.