Although monetary losses declined, users still lost tens of millions of dollars to common cybersecurity exploits like address poisoning scams. The total losses from hacks and cybersecurity exploits in the crypto industry amounted to about $76 million in December, a 60% decrease from November’s $194.2 million in losses, according to blockchain security company PeckShield. There were 26 major crypto exploits in December, PeckShield said in an X post, with one user losing $50 million in an address poisoning scams, a type of attack where the threat actor sends small amounts of cryptocurrency from a wallet that closely resembles a legitimate wallet address, betting that the intended victim won’t notice the discrepancy. Typically, the first and last four characters of the addresses match, with the attacker hoping that the victim will accidentally send funds to the fraudulent address by selecting the poisoned address from their transaction history without closely examining the entire string. Read more
The plan to address a multimillion-dollar exploit continued with "phase two progress" on EVM after it scrapped a plan to roll back the blockchain. The Flow Foundation is continuing to implement a remediation plan in response to a $3.9 million exploit of the blockchain on Saturday, flagging concerns about large token movements on a centralized exchange. In a Thursday X post, Flow said it had made “significant progress” in its recovery plan, now entering phase two and expected to take several days. According to the platform, developers had “identified a path to restore EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] functionality” as it addressed its non-EVM chain, Cadence. “The Community Governance Council continues executing cleanup transactions under validator-authorized boundaries, consistent with established precedents for digital asset recovery,” said Flow. “All remediation activity is publicly auditable on-chain through block explorers. Cadence and EVM remediation will now proceed simultaneously.” Read more