A Billion Here (in Crypto Theft), a Billion There – After a While, it Adds Up
To quote a former senator, it does add up. this year it is adding up quickly.
Blockchain analysis group Chainalysis says that hackers stole more than $2 billion in crypto in the first 6 months of 2025.
$1.5 billion of that comes the hack of Bybit – by hackers connected to North Korea.
That $2.17 billion stolen in the first half of 2025 is more than was stolen in all of 2024. Assuming this rate holds, we could see $4 billion in losses this year.
There are two major sources of attacks – attacks on crypto exchanges and attacks on personal crypto wallets. Why? Because both are software and software has bugs. Just a fact of life.
Personal wallet attacks are vulnerable to both social engineering and software bugs. Many owners of crypto wallets are not information security experts so they trust the software in those wallets.
Crypto exchanges, on the other hand, are expected to be security experts, but in many cases they trust that software that is rushed to market be first. Not a great strategy.
Last month Israel attacked Iran’s crypto industry and vaporized $90 million in Iranian crypto assets. Both of these cases are nation state actors attacking crypto because it is easy. You can likely do it from anywhere in the world as opposed to, say, robbing a bank. You are much less likely to get killed robbing crypto than robbing a bank and you are likely to get much more money. Which bank do you stick up to get $1.5 billion?
North Korea is actually being very smart in attacking their victims, modifying its attack techniques as needed.
If you move down the food chain from the top tier, highly capitalized, crypto exchanges, their software practices are likely not top tier either.
When it comes to crypto wallets, the wallet maker has zero liability, no matter the reason for the attack. Likely, the crypto exchange has no liability either.
Customers who lose money to crypto attacks are not insured. Maybe the owners of the exchange will make their customers whole, but they are not obligated to. We have heard of too many people who have lost all of their savings to crypto attacks.
So you should feel free to use and speculate in crypto as long as you understand that YOU own 100 percent of the risk of loss. If that is not okay with you then you should not get involved.
If you think crypto is interesting, make sure that whatever you put into crypto is no more than you are okay with, worst case, losing all of. If you do that, well, life is risky; some things a little more risky than others. But if you bet your house, you could be homeless.
Credit: The Record
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