Analysis of Security Vulnerabilities in the Crypto Industry: 20 Typical Attack Cases Reveal Three Major Patterns

BroadChain learned that at 18:16 on April 21, in April 2026, Kelp DAO suffered over $200 million in bad debt within 46 minutes, with total losses reaching $292 million, due to an attacker exploiting uncollateralized tokens to borrow real assets on Aave. This is just one example of a recent series of security incidents, including Drift Protocol losing $285 million, Step Finance losing approximately $30 million, and Resolv Labs losing around $23 million. By reviewing a total of 20 representative theft cases from history and recent times, three significant patterns can be observed: technical vulnerability cases dominate in number but involve relatively limited individual losses; permission and social engineering attack cases, though fewer, account for the vast majority of total losses; and the scale of permission-based attacks is continuously escalating. Notably, the four largest loss incidents all involved North Korean hacker groups, while the battlefield for technical vulnerabilities is shifting, with security issues in the cross-chain bridge domain being particularly prominent. Among the top ten projects by loss amount, Bybit lost $1.5 billion in February 2025 due to the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group compromising Safe Wallet's multi-signature mechanism through frontend UI hijacking and multi-signature fraud; Ronin Network lost $624 million in March 2022, also attributed to Lazarus Group gaining control of validator node private keys through social engineering; Poly Network lost $611 million in August 2021, primarily due to severe vulnerabilities in cross-chain contract permission management; Wormhole lost $326 million in February 2022, stemming from the use of outdated and insecure functions in its signature verification process; Drift Protocol lost $285 million in April 2026, where attackers executed a six-month targeted infiltration combined with a Solana Durable Nonce pre-signature scam; WazirX lost $235 million in July 2024, resulting from the gradual compromise and replacement of its multi-signature wallet with a malicious contract; Cetus lost $223 million in May 2025, exploiting an arithmetic overflow vulnerability in the protocol's liquidity calculation; Gala Games lost $216 million in May 2024, primarily due to the compromise of private keys for high-permission minting accounts; Mixin Network lost $200 million in September 2023, caused by the theft of private keys stored in a centralized cloud database; Euler Finance lost $197 million in March 2023, exploiting inconsistencies in the protocol's internal asset and liability calculation logic. Among the ten recent incidents, Hyperbridge lost approximately $2.5 million in April 2026 due to flaws in the proof verification logic of its Token Gateway; Venus Protocol lost between $3.7 million and $5 million in March 2026, where attackers profited by bypassing supply cap checks and exploiting vulnerabilities in the exchange rate calculation logic.