In a striking development for the digital asset ecosystem, crypto hack losses plunged to approximately $76 million in December, representing a nearly 60% drop from Novemberâs reported $194.27 million total, according to data from blockchain security firm PeckShield.
While this decline suggests a potential moderation in exploit activity against decentralized finance and wallet infrastructure, a handful of high-impact incidents still accounted for a significant share of the damage, underscoring that the threat landscape remains dynamic and perilous.
December Hack Landscape: Fewer Exploits, Bigger Hits
December saw about 26 major exploits, with attacks that combined deceptive tactics and exposed credentials inflicting the most substantial losses. The most costly incident involved an address poisoning scam that drained roughly $50M from an unwitting user. In this type of scheme, attackers send minute transactions from a wallet address crafted to look nearly identical to a legitimate one, hoping victims will accidentally select the fraudulent destination when copying details during transfers.
#PeckShieldAlert 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.
Notably:
đşWallet 0xcB80…819 lost $50M⌠pic.twitter.com/CNW3R6646j— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) January 1, 2026
Private key leaks also played a critical role, particularly in a case where a multi-signature wallet was compromised, resulting in about $27.3M in stolen funds despite the enhanced security features such configurations are supposed to provide. This breach reinforced industry warnings that strong key management practices are essential even when using advanced wallet protections.
Risk Management and Security Maturity Signal a Strategic Inflection Point
Beyond these headline-grabbing exploits, browser-based wallets continued to draw attacker interest. For instance, a Christmas Day breach of a popular wallet browser extension saw approximately $7M siphoned from users, highlighting the risks posed by always-online wallets compared to offline alternatives such as hardware devices.
Social engineering remained a persistent threat vector, as demonstrated by a phishing and impersonation scheme in which an individual posing as an exchange employee reportedly convinced around 100 users to transfer $16M by exploiting urgency and trust rather than software vulnerabilities.
Despite the overall decline in total losses, security experts caution that the reduction in dollar amounts does not imply the end of threats to usersâ assets. A few large-scale incidents can still make up the bulk of a monthâs damage, and ongoing creativity in scam techniques means both individual and institutional stakeholders must maintain robust operational safeguards.
While the December figure may appear encouraging compared with prior months, the concentration of losses in a limited number of attacks underscores that vigilance and improved personal security practicesâsuch as verifying every character of destination addresses and storing private keys offlineâremain paramount for participants in the crypto ecosystem
