Crypto Losses Rise 55% to $1.18B Across 107 Q3 Incidents

A $1.18 billion toll from 107 crypto security incidents marked the third quarter, as problems involving vendors, missed fixes and out-of-scope components represented 77% of losses.

Losses rose 55% from $763.9 million across 67 incidents in Q2. The incident count increased about 60%, from 67 to 107.

About $906.8 million was tied to compromised suppliers or developer tools, disclosed security fixes that had not been installed, and components outside the latest security review. This breakdown does not show how many affected projects had audits or establish that audits failed.

An audit record can identify the repository, commit hash and assets reviewed, defining what a particular assessment covered. Hacken co-founder and board director Andrii Matiukhin said, “The problem is always scope.”

Smart-contract exploits accounted for 48% of Q3 losses, up from 12% in Q2. Access-control and operational failures made up 40%, down from 88% a quarter earlier.

Bitget said investigations by Mandiant and SlowMist identified compromised third-party security products as the route into its wallet environment. The company later put transfers to attacker-controlled addresses at about $387.5 million, up from its initial $351.6 million estimate after including transfers involving Zcash (ZEC) and TRON (TRX). The revised amount measures transfers, not net unrecovered losses.