Crypto lost $600M to hacks in 2026, AI is making it worse

Over $600 million have been lost to crypto hacks within the first few months of 2026, most of which have been linked to two attacks by North Korea's hacking groups. The more significant of the two attacks is the $293 million hack of the Kelp DAO, conducted in April through a point-of-trust vulnerability on the LayerZero messaging system.

The other attack targeted the Drift Protocol in the days following the above attack, costing it $280 million in losses. Hackers are not out merely to take what they can. Instead, they know where to look and how to find it.

North Korean hackers deploys AI in social engineering

A third DPRK-linked incident, disclosed by crypto wallet Zerion on April 15, showed a different tactic entirely. Hackers used AI in a sustained social engineering campaign, ultimately stealing roughly $100,000 from Zerion's hot wallets.

The dollar amount is modest; the method is the signal. Separately, a threat actor named "Jinkusu" was reported on April 6 to be selling tools using deepfakes and voice manipulation to bypass KYC checks at exchanges and banks.

Natalie Newson, a senior blockchain investigator at CertiK, says AI will worsen the threat environment "in some aspects" but is not without a defensive upside. Her immediate guidance: verify every URL and smart contract before interacting and move idle assets off exchanges entirely.

"Using cold wallets allows you to sign transactions without ever exposing your private keys," she said. Supply chain attacks alone accounted for $1.45 billion in losses in 2025 across just two incidents, including the $1.4 billion Bybit hack.

AI is getting involved on the defensive front as well. Anthropic recently launched Claude Mythos, a program that supposedly identifies flaws in major operating systems, in a beta version for some tech companies.

The US Department of the Treasury, Office of Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection, said on April 9th that they would start using their threat assessment project to evaluate digital asset companies, as their infrastructure has become equal to the financial one.