Crypto's October: 56 major hacks and $6.48 billion gone

Thankfully, Cybersecurity Awareness Month has come to an end.

It had already been a bumper month: a PHP vulnerability put an estimated 70% of websites at risk, and spyware-planted Ledger devices were drained of $90 million. Then it closed with a bang, as Binance suffered the biggest hack — or theft of any kind — on record.

This year's theme, chosen by the National Cybersecurity Alliance, was “Don't Make It Easy for Them.” Still, plenty of observers read the run of serious security breaches over the past month — in crypto and beyond — as evidence of how dire cybersecurity has become now that hacking is AI-assisted.

I would like to congratulate the organizers of the 2026 Cybersecurity Awareness Month for putting together a truly spectacular event

— lcamtuf (@lcamtuf) October 31, 2026

Hacks arriving several times a day

The blockchain security firm PeckShield counted 56 “major hacks” in the crypto sector over the course of Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

#PeckShieldAlert In October 2026, the crypto industry experienced 56 major hacks, resulting in total losses of $6.48B, a ~745% month-over-month increase from September’s $766.49M.

The #Binance incident (~$6.3B, with $3B already frozen) has jumped to #1 among the largest crypto…

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) November 1, 2026

Almost all of the month's losses trace back to the enormous $6.3 billion Binance hack, roughly $3 billion of which was frozen on-chain. The FBI has formally attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, which it links to North Korea, while the DPRK denies any involvement.

In its latest update, Binance laid out the “sophisticated, multi-stage campaign” behind the attack. It began in June, when an employee downloaded a malicious version of the package manager Homebrew.

Another engineer was then, in September, “instructed to download an ‘assignment’ containing a malicious code repository” as part of a staged job interview. Through October the hackers widened their access before carrying out the attack on the 29th.

The month's other large-scale loss hit Ledger users who had bought spyware-implanted devices from reseller CryptoBilis; together they lost $90 million in assets.

Other incidents drew coverage too: MetaMask unstaked $1.4 billion of ETH following a security scare, CoinDCX sought to sweep a $16 million hack under the rug, Keystone decided to destroy 19,000 units of inventory because a key had been compromised, and data leaks hit users of Coinbase and Bithumb.

Plenty of further incidents caused smaller losses which, in the words of one security researcher, “get no post mortem and no tweet from the team, the money is just gone.” 

With hacks mounting — the year has already recorded twice as many crypto hacks as 2025 did — Ethereum researcher Justin Drake on October 8 called on the blockchain industry to enter “bunker mode” against AI threats.

That suggestion did not land especially well. Vitalik Buterin warned users against a “scramble” to move funds, while acknowledging that quantum-vulnerable and AI-vulnerable cryptography deserve to be taken seriously.

Beyond crypto

Outside the crypto bubble, a PHP vulnerability put an estimated 70% of the web at risk, with some governments switching off their own sites as a precaution. The damage reached the physical world as well: hacked supermarket fridges in France were turned up to high temperatures, causing spoilage estimated in the tens of millions of euros.

November, so far, is off to a flying start too. And every indication is that security incidents will only grow more frequent from here.

A bug in Linux has been dubbed the “worst bug in the history of the internet”, supermarket fridges are being hacked again — this time across Europe — and on the crypto side Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin lost close to $50 million yesterday.

On top of that, blockchain sleuth ZachXBT has traced roughly $130 million in stolen funds back to what he believes is a “large financial institution in Western Europe” — yet no one has so far admitted to being the victim.