Crypto Hack Losses Reach $768 Million in September, Marking 2026’s Worst Month

Crypto hacks have resulted in over $766 million (roughly Rs. 7,376 crore) worth of gross losses during September alone, marking the most expensive month in 2026 owing to Bitget and Liquid Network breaches. According to PeckShield, there have been 55 security breaches, with a total of around $766 million (roughly Rs. 7,376 crore) stolen, whereas according to CertiK, there were 97 security breaches, with $768.4 million (roughly Rs. 7,399 crore) lost. Both companies have used different techniques for tracking and did not provide the same number of occurrences, but the discrepancy between their valuations of the total value that was stolen was less than $2 million (roughly Rs. 19 crore). 

Liquid Network Exploit Left Federation With 197 BTC in Reserves

The biggest individual incident occurred on September 24 at Bitget. The company verified that around $387.5 million (roughly Rs. 3,731 crore) worth of cryptocurrency had been sent to wallets controlled by the hackers, up from a revised estimate of $351.6 million (roughly Rs. 3,385 crore). The compromise affected parts of Bitget's hot and warm wallet system on Ethereum as well as other EVM chains, XRP Ledger, Zcash, and Tron networks. The crypto assets affected include ETH, XRP, USDT, USDC, ZEC, BNB, AVAX, and TRX. According to Bitget, the cold wallets and private keys were not affected.

Liquid Network was hit by another significant attack in September, when a flaw in the Elements codebase enabled an attacker to generate about 4,000 L-BTC without a corresponding number of Bitcoin backing it. According to Liquid Network, a flaw in its range proof verification cache helped a malicious transaction go through the system and thus led to the theft of almost 4,000 BTC through Liquid's standard peg-out mechanism. This left the Bitcoin reserves held by the federation with just 197 BTC.

Apart from Bitget and Liquid, CertiK uncovered various small-scale attacks that happened in September. Safe Wallet was attacked for approximately $7.8 million (roughly Rs. 75 crore), whereas Dcent and Duelbits faced attacks amounting to about $6 million (roughly Rs. 58 crore) and $5.9 million (roughly Rs. 57 crore), respectively.

The latest CertiSk dataset for 2026 includes 656 incidents and $2.68 billion (roughly Rs. 25,810 crore), as per the numbers released along with its September figures. September, on its own, has become the biggest month of the year in terms of stolen amounts.

September's figure was far above August. PeckShield had counted 50 major attacks worth roughly $136.3 million (roughly Rs. 1,312 crore) during August, according to the previous monthly hack report. This is a 67 percent increase from the 30 cases reported in July. The number of crypto hacks witnessed a sharp increase in August, even though the amount of money lost declined by almost half from July levels, as per the blockchain security firm.