It’s been a turbulent year for the cryptocurrency industry — market prices have taken a huge dip, crypto giants have collapsed and billions have been stolen in crypto exploits and hacks. It was not even halfway through October when Chainalysis declared 2022 to be the “biggest year ever for hacking activity.” As of Dec. 29, the 10 largest exploits of 2022 have seen $2.1 billion stolen from crypto protocols. Below are those exploits and hacks, ranked from smallest to largest. 10: Beanstalk Farms exploit — $76M Stablecoin protocol Beanstalk Farms suffered a $76 million exploit on April 18 from an attacker using a flash loan to buy governance tokens. This was used to pass two proposals that inserted malicious smart contracts. The exploit was initially thought to have cost around $182 mil...
Just two months after losing $15.6 million in a price oracle manipulation exploit, Inverse Finance has again been hit with a flashloan exploit that saw the attackers make off with $1.26 million in Tether (USDT) and Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC). Inverse Finance is an Ethereum based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol and a flashloan is a type of crypto loan that is usually borrowed and returned within a single transaction. Oracles report outside pricing information. The latest exploit worked by using a flashloan to manipulate the price oracle for a liquidity provider (LP) token used by the protocol’s money market application. This allowed the attacker to borrow a larger amount of the protocol’s stablecoin DOLA than the amount of collateral they posted, letting them pocket the difference. The at...