Cybercriminals often target crypto exchanges which is why you should store your funds in a private or hardware wallet instead.
As the cryptocurrency market has boomed over the last 10 years, so too have the number of security breaches and cyberattacks trying to take advantage of its growth. According to a new report from invezz, it’s estimated $12.1bn in cryptocurrency was stolen between January 2011 and December 2021 with Japan, South Korea, the US, the UK and China being the countries with the most security breaches. When it comes to how such a massive amount of money was stolen, exploiting vulnerabilities in crypto exchange security systems was the most common tactic with $3.18bn lost in security breaches, $1.76bn stolen through Decentralized Finance ( DeFi) hacks and $7.12bn lost through crypto scams. At the same time, crypto scams increased by 850 percent from 2011 to 2021 and this year saw the highest number of scams with 76 in total. However, the largest increase in the number of scams occurred between 2016 to 2017 (180%) when some of the most serious cyberattacks took place. The hack of the Japanese crypto exchange Mt.
