Hackers do pose a serious risk to holders of digital assets. Especially often the former take advantage of the so-called blind signature of transactions. This is about confirming transactions, all the details of which the coin holder does not understand – instead, he sees only a long hash of letters and numbers.

In this way, fraudsters can force the victim to unknowingly provide permission to withdraw cryptocurrencies and tokens from the wallet. For example, such a thing is required when trading on decentralised exchanges, when the platform sends new assets to an address and at the same time takes away other coins involved in the transaction.

And if a user falls for this trick and confirms a malicious transaction, all of their crypto can be sent to the scammers’ wallets in an instant.

Blind signature warning on the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet

Is it possible to protect yourself from this? Yes. First of all, it is advisable to ignore signing transactions whose essence you do not understand. It is also important to use a combination of cold storage with isolation from the Internet and a hot wallet that is always online.

That is, we store most of our coins on hardware wallets from Ledger, Trezor, and other vendors. The trick is to use these devices only to receive and send coins, ignoring any smart contracts and platforms from decentralised finance. This way we protect ourselves from risks in case such a platform is hacked in the future.

And a relatively small amount can be kept on a hot wallet like Phantom and MetaMask, which will be used to interact with decentralised applications. Even if such a wallet is hacked, the loss will be small.

How money is stolen from cryptocurrency wallets

Mitchell Amador, founder of the security platform ImmuneFi, gave details about the activity of fraudsters in crypto during a speech at the Web Summit 2024 event. Hacking protocols from decentralised finance is “clearly a sustainable and viable business today”, he said.

However, the coin industry itself is generally becoming safer, as the share of losses due to scammer activity is sagging one way or another, Decrypt reported.

Cryptocurrency hacking

Hackers are now targeting far more damage to the cryptocurrency industry than ever before, while their skills can be applied to other areas as well, Amador notes. That is, even if scammers don’t manage to make a big payoff by hacking for a certain period of time, they can still get into mining extracted value (MEVs) or other ways to monetise their skills.

On an overall scale, however, crypto is becoming safer. Here, Amador referred to a report from colleagues at ImmuneFi on Q3 2024. They determined that losses from hacks in the crypto industry sagged 38 per cent compared to the same quarter last year to a mark of 424 million.

At the same time, the 2024 total surpassed the $1 billion mark. By comparison, the figure for 2022 was $3 billion and the figure for 2023 was $1.8 billion. Here’s a quote from an expert on the subject.

All of this is despite the growing value of the industry as a whole, as well as the increasing value of assets within blockchain. That is, on a per capita basis, the amount of risk per dollar of value is falling rapidly. And while we are seeing an increase in hacks, there are fewer major incidents.

Cryptocurrency hacking

As an example, Amador recalled the recent Radiant Capital hack in October 2024, which brought in $50 million to alleged North Korean hackers. He continues.

They went after victims’ private keys by hacking into devices at the core of the system and spoofing transaction details in a rather bizarre kind of middleman attack, which is highly exotic in itself.

The security expert notes that hackers are increasingly turning to so-called social engineering to break into DeFi protocols. One way or another, humans are always the weakest link in the chain of hacker activity.

Amador also recalled Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in November 2024. According to the ImmuneFi representative, the support of the coin industry by a politician will definitely benefit the niche. In addition, the reputation of cryptocurrencies will turn out to be much better.

This seems to be a huge net benefit to the industry in terms of its overall growth and friendliness. In turn, something like this will stimulate the activity of security experts.

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Meanwhile, hackers reminded the Cardano cryptocurrency community. On Sunday, the official Twitter of this platform was hacked, reports The Block.

First, they announced the alleged launch of the ADA cryptocurrency based on the Solana network under the ticker $ADASOL. As noted in the announcement, the project was supposed to combine the capabilities of Cardano “with the speed and innovation of Solana.”

Tweet by scammers who hacked the Cardano Foundation team’s Twitter feed

The scammers published a whole thread of thirteen messages explaining the essence of the new project. And in them there was a place for mentioning a recent podcast from Cardano Foundation, which allegedly recalled this project. In other words, scammers tried to pass off what was happening as a real event.


According to the DexScreener platform, the fraudulent token racked up $500,000 in trading volume. After that, traders nullified their interactions with it.

An hour later, the messages were deleted. Instead, the scammers published another fake – this time about the alleged filing of a lawsuit by the Securities Commission against the Cardano team. Apparently, this way they wanted to cause a collapse of the ADA rate and make money on it with short positions.


Alas, scammers will always be present in the crypto industry, and their modus operandi will become more and more difficult. Therefore, investors need to keep an eye on trends in the industry to understand possible scam scenarios. On top of that, caution should always be exercised and suspicious links and any similar offers should be ignored.

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