Hacken recorded $1.18 billion in third-quarter crypto theft, a 55% rise from the second quarter. Losses implied by its access-control and operational figures fell about 30%, while September incidents at Bitget and Liquid showed withdrawal controls failing without a stolen key.
Crypto security firm Hacken recorded $1.18 billion in Q3 theft across 107 incidents, a 55% increase from the second quarter. Yet the losses implied by its access-control and operational figures fell about 30%.
Smart contract losses take a larger share
Hacken's second-quarter summary recorded $763.9 million extracted across 67 incidents, with 88.3% of losses attributed to compromised keys, signers, and infrastructure. The third-quarter report puts 48% of losses on smart contracts, up from about 11% in the original second-quarter summary.
Incidents also rose, from 67 to 107. Dividing the published totals by incident counts gives roughly $11.4 million per incident in the second quarter and $11 million in the third, and CryptoSlate notes that more incidents can lift an aggregate even when the arithmetic mean falls.
Bitget: forged withdrawal commands
According to CryptoSlate, Bitget's Oct. 14 account update describes attackers obtaining high-privilege internal credentials and injecting forged withdrawal commands. Bitget says private key compromise was ruled out and cold wallets were unaffected.
Bitget's initial notice estimated approximately $351.6 million affected. The October account puts the final verified affected amount at approximately $388 million.
Liquid: invalid assets passed validation
Blockstream said an Elements range-proof cache defect allowed approximately 4,000 unbacked LBTC to pass validation. SideSwap said it handled the roughly 4,000-LBTC order automatically, without size, velocity, or wallet-history checks.
Blockstream said the peg-out authorization key was not stolen or forged. Its September assessment recorded 3,400 BTC returned on Sept. 7 and approximately 602 BTC outstanding at the report date.
Source: CryptoSlate
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