Despite 2025 being another record-breaking year for crypto crime, December saw a 60% reduction in the total losses from hacks and cybersecurity exploits in the industry, down from $194.2 million in losses in November to $76 million in December, based on data from blockchain security company PeckShield.
In a post on X, PeckShield said: “December 2025 witnessed ~26 major crypto exploits, resulting in total losses of ~$76M. This figure represents a decrease of over 60% from November’s total of $194.27M, marking a significant reduction in monthly losses.”
The figure for December was also largely down to just two significant losses. Specifically, the firm said that $50 million was lost by a single wallet via so-called “address poisoning,” whereby the perpetrator generates lookalike addresses similar to those with which the victim has previously interacted, and then engages with the victim to “poison” their transaction history and get them to mistakenly send tokens to the lookalike address; while the second largest loss was a single wallet drained of $27.3 million due to a private key leak.
This substantial end-of-year reduction in losses to theft and hacks, when compared to November, represents the silver lining on a year that, overall, saw numbers of illicit crypto activity go up.
According to an end-of-the-year report from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, the digital asset industry witnessed over $3.4 billion in theft from January through early December 2025, with the February compromise of Bybit alone accounting for $1.5 billion of that total.
Thanks in large part to this latter incident, it didn’t take long for 2025 to outstrip the previous year’s stats. In Chainalysis’ 2025 “mid-year update,” the firm found that by July $2.17 billion had been stolen from cryptocurrency services, making it already more devastating than the entirety of 2024.
“Amid this shifting landscape, stolen fund activity stands out as the dominant concern in 2025,” said the report. “While other forms of illicit activity have shown mixed trends YoY, the surge in cryptocurrency thefts represents both an immediate threat to ecosystem participants and a long-term challenge for the industry’s security infrastructure.”
It added that “the cumulative trend in value taken from services paints a stark picture of 2025’s escalating threat environment.”
Despite this worrying picture, Peckshield’s recent figures indicate that the continued upward trajectory of thefts, noted mid-year by Chainalysis, is not an unavoidable inevitability. Therefore, perhaps the end-of-year drop can provide some reason for industry advocates to be optimistic about a better and safer 2026.
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Source: https://coingeek.com/digital-asset-hack-losses-drop-60-in-december/
