April turned out to be one of the toughest months for the crypto space, largely due to a wave of hacking attacks. As reported by BlockBeats, at least 13 crypto projects and platforms were compromised, leading to total losses of more than $600 million. Two of the biggest incidents involved Drift and KelpDAO, each losing over $280 million. Several of these attacks have been linked to hacker groups associated with North Korea.

On April 1, Drift Protocol, the largest decentralized perpetual trading platform on Solana, was breached, resulting in a loss of around $285 million. The attacker had been preparing for nearly three weeks, beginning on March 11 by withdrawing 10 #ETH from Tornado Cash. The actual hack took only about 12 minutes to execute, and within hours, most of the funds were moved to Ethereum using Circle CCTP. This incident became the second-largest security breach in Solana’s history, after the $326 million Wormhole hack.

Later in the month, on April 13, Hyperbridge was exploited due to a flaw in cross-chain proof verification, causing losses of about $2.5 million. On April 16, Rhea Finance was targeted, with attackers draining roughly $18.4 million. The same day, Grinex, a platform linked to Russia, was also attacked, losing around $15 million.

Then on April 18, Kelp DAO suffered a major exploit where approximately 116,500 rsETH was stolen. The attacker manipulated cross-chain messaging to deceive the LayerZero EndpointV2 contract’s “lzReceive” function into releasing funds from the bridge reserves. This breach has now overtaken Drift, becoming the largest DeFi hack recorded so far in 2020$ETH