The crypto heists to date are MT Gox, Bitgrail, Coincheck, KuCoin, PancakeBunny.
MT Gox
MT Gox was the first large-scale exchange hack, and it remains the most significant Bitcoin (BTC) heist from an exchange. The MT Gox robbery, on the other hand, was not a one-off occurrence. Rather, the site leaked cash from 2011 to February 2014.
Hackers stole 100,000 BTC from the exchange and 750,000 BTC from its consumers over a few years. These Bitcoin burglaries were valued at $470 million at the time, but they’re now worth approximately ten times this amount. Shortly after the theft, MT Gox went into liquidation, with liquidators recovering roughly 200,000 of the stolen BTC.
Bitgrail
Bitgrail was a small Italian exchange that traded in obscure cryptos like Nano (XNO). The exchange was hacked in February 2018, just as the price of XNO soared from a few cents to $33. At least 17 million coins (the equivalent of about $150 million) were taken from Nano wallets.
Many users began to express their dissatisfaction with the exchange before the attack (significantly lower withdrawal limits and transaction problems). According to the investigations, the coins were stolen from cold—not hot— wallets. Investigations persisted throughout the preceding three years, with Italian authorities now charging Bitgrail’s owner of being behind the attacks.
Coincheck
Coincheck, based in Japan, had $530 million worth of NEM (XEM) tokens stolen in January 2018. Hackers took advantage of the fact that the currency was kept in a “hot” wallet, which meant it was connected to the server and thus “online” (a cold wallet sees funds stored offline).
The stolen coins were identified and marked as such by NEM developers, although there was conjecture that the monies were available on dark markets.
However, given how much the coins lost in value following the attack, it’s unlikely that many people would have thought this was a good deal (the coins are now worth 83% less than they were—roughly $90 million).
KuCoin
KuCoin announced in September 2020 that hackers had obtained private keys to their hot wallets before withdrawing substantial quantities of Ethereum (ETH), BTC, Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP), Stellar Lumens (XLM), Tron (TRX) and Tether (USDT). Since then, experts have claimed that they have reasonable cause to assume that crypto heist hackers are North Korean.
PancakeBunny
This flash loan attack, in which hackers were able to siphon $200 million from the platform, occurred in May 2021 and is among the more severe cases of cryptocurrency theft. The hacker loaned a big sum of Binance Coin (BNB) before manipulating its price and selling it on PancakeBunny’s BUNNY/BNB market to carry out the attack.
This allowed the hacker to obtain a large number of BUNNY via a flash loan, dump all of the BUNNY on the market to lower the price, and then repay the BNB using PancakeSwap.