The largest cracking and attacks in the cryptospace in 2017

Hard forks? Soft forks? ICOs? This year, users who have become entangled in new, unfamiliar terms, have again turned out to be a ready target for hackers and cybercriminals. Not all attacks and scams were the same. Some were created literally from scratch, but entailed huge losses. Whether it's a normal wallets, a fraudulent ICO, or a code snippet, investors often lost millions of dollars. As a result of the incidents described below, there were stolen cryptocurrencies for a total of $ 490 million. The perpetrators of these crimes have not yet been found, and the stolen funds themselves, most likely, will not be returned. Of course, here a far from complete list of hacking of cryptocurrency projects and various scams with cryptocurrencies and tokens, but only the most sensational cases.

Attack on ICO CoinDash

Startup CoinDash was launched this summer through the ICO, but very soon it had to suspend his activities because of hacking the site and substituting the wallet for the Ethereum.

Because of a successful attack on the project site, the hacker changed the wallet address, and the 7.3 million dollars attracted by the start-up went to an unknown direction. The company closed the ICO, promising to send remuneration in the form of CDT tokens to all participants.

In addition, although the company warned that the payments sent after the above statement would not be paid, some investors continued to send funds to the address of the hacker, thereby involuntarily increasing the amount of stolen funds from $ 7 to $ 10 million.

This incident demonstrated that, despite the ability to attract huge amounts, ICOs are still very young technology that faces many problems. 

The first hacking of Parity wallet

For the operator of the cryptocurrency wallet Parity, the year of 2017 turned out to be difficult, because it was attacked twice.

The first problems began in July, after the developers of the wallet discovered a vulnerability in version 1.5, as a result of which almost 153 000 Ethereums were stolen from users' accounts.

The error was found in wallets with multi-signatures and jeopardized several companies-participants in the ICO. At that time, the cost of the stolen esters was about $ 32 million, and by the end of December this figure had increased to $ 105 million.

The problem was called "critical." Technical director Parity Gavin Wood (Gavin Wood) named at least three hacked addresses and said that the company will make every effort to prevent further losses.

Later it was discovered that more than 70,000 ethers had already been cashed or withdrawn in another way, in other words - lost forever.

The Scam with the Enigma project

In August, the startup Enigma found that its site, the mailing list and the administrator's account in Slack were hacked, and the scammers launched a fake pre-sale of tokens, thus luring out more than 1,500 ETH to investors.

With the help of captured accounts, scammers promised greater profits from investments and posed as project operators. Before the Enigma team managed to regain control over the accounts, the wallet with the broadcasts was devastated, the stolen funds could not be recovered.

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