In early February 2026, Beijing time, the security agency PeckShield released the January 2026 cryptocurrency security monthly report: 16 attacks, totaling a loss of $86.01 million. This figure creates a subtle tension between a slight year-on-year decrease of 1.42% and a staggering month-on-month increase of 13.25%. On one side is the statistical narrative of "a slight retreat in hacker attack losses," while on the other, multiple security agencies simultaneously remind us that "the financial losses caused by phishing remain astonishing." On-chain attack data may be cooling, but broader security risks are spreading in the shadows—from contract vulnerabilities to social engineering, from front-running to scam scripts. This month's report acts like a mirror, prompting the industry to re-examine an uncomfortable question: Is the observed "improvement" in security a fact, or an illusion created by statistical definitions and the migration of attacks?
The Boundary of Statistics Behind 16 Attacks and $86.01 Million Loss
● Data Framework and Coverage: According to the data released by PeckShield for January 2026, a total of 16 hacker attack incidents were recorded that month, with total losses of approximately $86.01 million. It is important to emphasize that this statistic mainly focuses on traditional on-chain attacks, including contract exploitations, permission abuses, and cross-chain bridge attacks. Broader security incidents such as account theft, phishing signatures, and off-chain social engineering scams are only mentioned in scattered dimensions and are not systematically included in the total loss.
● Year-on-Year and Month-on-Month "Scissors Gap": On the surface, the hacker losses in January decreased by 1.42% compared to January 2025, which might be interpreted as a slight improvement in security. However, compared to December 2025, it actually represents a month-on-month increase of 13.25%. Research briefs indicate that December last year was itself an anomalously low value, influenced by global holidays and a cooling trading sentiment, leading to a significant contraction in on-chain activity, with both attack opportunities and willingness to attack declining, making January's "rebound" appear exaggerated against a low baseline.
● Underestimated Risk Pool: Parallel to PeckShield's on-chain attack metrics, other security agencies repeatedly emphasized in January that "the financial losses caused by phishing remain astonishing." Most of these losses occur in scenarios involving signature authorizations, private key leaks, impersonated customer service, and fake website links, which are often not counted as typical "hacker attack incidents," yet directly consume user assets. Focusing solely on on-chain attack curves can lead to a systematic underestimation of the real risk level.
● Foreshadowing Embedded in Statistical Boundaries: This also highlights a key question—what is defined as a "security incident"? Is it a breach of contract code, a user signing the wrong transaction, or clicking the wrong link in a chat application? The way different agencies classify incidents determines whether the numbers appear stable or deteriorating. January's $86.01 million is just the tip of the iceberg, laying the groundwork for later discussions on broader security losses and comparisons across multiple agencies.
From Contract Vulnerabilities to Social Engineering Traps: Attacks are Changing Their Skin
● Pure Technical Attacks Yield to Mixed Tactics: Early cryptocurrency security incidents mostly focused on "hardcore technical aspects" such as contract vulnerabilities, logical flaws, and permission configuration errors. However, since 2025, security agencies have generally observed a trend: an increasing number of attacks are not based on a single technical vulnerability but are a hybrid of contract risks and social engineering, phishing. Attackers first induce user interaction through social relationships, impersonated identities, or airdrop bait, and then complete the final plunder at the contract level; technology is merely the last act of the play.
● The Scale of Phishing Financial Impact: In a specific source's statistics, the total loss in January 2026 was approximately $370.3 million, of which about $311.3 million came from phishing. This data currently only represents a specific agency's metrics and still needs to be cross-verified with other sources, but its scale alone is sufficient to illustrate the issue: compared to traceable on-chain hacker attacks, phishing links hidden in chat software, social platforms, and search result pages are consuming a larger slice of the asset pie.
● Instant Zeroing in Extreme Scenarios: Research briefs also mention that the loss from a single social engineering scam can reach hundreds of millions of dollars. Such incidents often occur in off-chain lending, OTC trading, or communications disguised as "official customer service," where a single wrong signature or file sharing can trigger a one-click transfer of funds. For victims, there is no "recovery after the contract is fixed," but rather a drastic cliff from full holdings to zero.
● User Psychological Turning Point: Under this migration of attacks, users' subjective fears are also changing. Rather than fearing obscure technical detail vulnerabilities, they are more afraid of those social engineering traps that are hard to discern with the naked eye: seemingly perfect imitation of official website interfaces, domain names that differ by just one letter, and fake accounts with familiar avatars. When the risk shifts from "I don't understand the code" to "I can't see the people and links," the focus of security anxiety is quietly rewritten.
$370 Million vs. $86.01 Million: Two Sets of Numbers, Two Types of Security Awareness
● Direct Confrontation of Two Numbers: If we zoom out to a broader statistical framework, PeckShield's $86.01 million hacker loss immediately contrasts sharply with another set of figures—some security agencies report a total loss of approximately $370.3 million for January 2026. The nearly fourfold difference between the two is not simply a matter of "who miscalculated," but rather an inevitable consequence of entirely different statistical frameworks.
● Key Variables in Metric Differences: PeckShield primarily focuses on "hacker attacks," which refers to malicious exploitation at the on-chain contract and protocol levels; while the other set of data includes broader security incidents such as phishing, where phishing losses alone are estimated at $311.3 million (also from a single source, pending cross-verification). Under this framework, on-chain attacks are merely the tip of the iceberg, with most funds quietly evaporating in the gray areas of signature authorization and private key management.
● The Difficulty of Unified Numbers: It is important to emphasize that there is currently no single, precise, consensus data regarding the scale of phishing losses. Different security agencies have discrepancies in statistical time periods, event classifications, and loss determinations, with some leaning towards conservatism and others attempting to capture broader fraud and social engineering behaviors. Therefore, while "losses remain astonishing" is a consensus confirmed by multiple parties, any single number is difficult to be regarded as the industry standard answer.
● The Cost of the Illusion of "Improvement" in Security: When the market only sees $86.01 million and only discusses a year-on-year decrease of 1.42% as a "mild fluctuation," it is easy to foster an optimistic sentiment that "the era of hackers is passing." However, if we include the broader loss dimension of $370 million, we find that the so-called "improvement" is more a result of self-comforting statistical definitions. This illusion not only weakens user vigilance but may also lead project parties to discount security issues in budgeting and product design.
The Gray Battlefield of New Front-Running and Old Scams Coexisting
● Signals of Unverified New Tactics: In the market voices of security agencies, some opinions mention that "new attack methods such as MEV builder front-running continue to emerge," and this information is currently clearly marked as pending verification, mainly from individual monitoring and community case sharing. Nevertheless, it still reveals a direction: attackers are linking traditional MEV front-running and arbitrage bot strategies with malicious contracts and permission hijacking, blurring the boundaries between "legitimate arbitrage" and "malicious plunder."
● Seemingly Normal Transactions, Hidden Plunder: One can imagine a narrative example: in a popular token transaction on a certain chain, users think they are merely participating in a normal buy or liquidity operation, and the block only adds a complex but "seemingly reasonable" routing and packaging. However, behind the scenes, an MEV builder targeting a specific transaction has already coordinated with a malicious contract, subtly adjusting fees, prioritizing order, and internal calling paths to quietly transfer the slippage space, rebate rewards, and even the principal that users should have received to the attacker's address.
● Coexistence of Technical Complexity and Crude Scams: In contrast to this complex on-chain gameplay is the still crude and effective phishing and social engineering—a fake airdrop link, a tweet about "official airdrop upgrades," or a private chat disguised as customer service. The former tests the control over block packaging logic and contract structure, while the latter directly exploits human weaknesses of greed, fear, and luck. Both technology and human vulnerabilities are being exploited simultaneously, creating a gray battlefield of multi-line operations.
● The Triangle Game Among Users, Project Parties, and Security Companies: In this battlefield, ordinary users are driven by profit, constantly chasing higher APRs and faster doubling opportunities; DeFi protocols and new projects are forced to accelerate innovation in competition, using complex structures and high leverage to attract traffic; security companies attempt to install barriers for the system through audit reports, real-time monitoring, and anti-phishing tools. However, the more they pursue new gameplay and high returns, the more they provide gray market teams with continuous trial-and-error space and samples, allowing them to iterate through failures and ultimately find new "replicable scripts."
The Emotions Behind the Numbers: Why is the Market Becoming More "Numb"?
● Illusion of Rhythm and Misjudgment of "Calm": Looking back at the two months from December 2025 to January 2026, one can see a typical rhythm: during the holiday period, on-chain trading and speculative sentiment cooled simultaneously, and attack incidents and statistical losses also declined; entering January, as market activity warmed up, attack data naturally "rebounded." If one easily concludes that "attacks suddenly surged" based solely on December's anomalously low value and January's month-on-month growth, it is also a misreading of cyclical fluctuations and holiday effects.
● Security Fatigue Under the Macro "Slight Decrease" Narrative: When media headlines focus on "hacker losses decreased slightly by 1.42% year-on-year" and "overall stable compared to the same period last year," project parties and users gradually form a dangerous mindset—security issues seem to be merely "occasional events," and the overall environment is improving. Under tight budgets and growth anxieties, security investments are more easily marginalized, and security teams are viewed as cost centers rather than product infrastructure, forming a typical risk discount mentality.
● Imbalance Between Thunderbolt Memories and Daily Bleeding: For public opinion and the market, a single scam or hacker incident worth hundreds of millions of dollars is enough to dominate headlines for several days and be included in annual reviews; while those high-frequency small phishing incidents occurring daily, with amounts ranging from hundreds to thousands, are rarely systematically reported. Over time, the industry remembers the occasional "thunder," rather than the ongoing "chronic bleeding," further reinforcing the collective perception that "unless the sky falls, security is still acceptable."
● The Risk of "Monthlyizing" Loss Numbers: When security losses are solidified as a fixed metric on monthly reports—"X million in hacker losses for a certain month, approximately Y billion in phishing losses"—it psychologically shifts from "disaster" to "operating cost." The problem then becomes sharp: when losses are viewed as normalized numbers, how much more is the industry willing to pay for security? Will there be a situation where, as long as losses do not break historical records, and as long as there are no new "legendary explosions," everyone tacitly accepts a "tolerable bleeding level"?
When Security Reports Become Monthly Regulars: Where Will the Next Breach Occur?
● Review of Core Contradictions: The figures from January 2026 outline a complex security landscape: on one hand, traditional hacker attack losses show only mild fluctuations year-on-year, seemingly under control; on the other hand, broader security risks, including phishing and social engineering, continue to rise in the interwoven realms of technology and human behavior, potentially far exceeding the on-chain attacks themselves. This structural contradiction of "surface stability with undercurrents" is reshaping the industry's understanding of security.
● The Necessity of Opposing "Numerical Worship": Regarding phishing losses, the current figures provided by various institutions vary between $300 million to $370 million, and research briefs clearly indicate that no single number should be granted the status of "unique precision." Rather than debating whose model is more accurate, it is more important to acknowledge that statistical differences themselves are a significant signal, reminding us not to be sedated by a seemingly "attractive" number, but to remain vigilant against the security illusions created by the choice of metrics.
● Paradigm Shift from Patching Vulnerabilities to Anti-Phishing: For project teams, security work can no longer be limited to the old paradigm of "patching after a vulnerability arises" or "auditing contracts once before launch," but must transition to "designing products and processes that resist phishing"—from defaulting to minimal permissions, signature readability, and permission layering, to anti-phishing prompts in interaction processes and multi-factor confirmations, compressing the "space for user errors" as much as possible at the product design level, rather than at the post-incident PR and compensation announcement level.
● User Risk Control Habits and the Next Turning Point: For users, "remembering a few security tips" is far from sufficient; what is truly needed is a systematic set of risk control habits: how to distinguish official information sources, how to manage keys and signing devices, and how to set physical and temporal isolation for high-value assets. Looking ahead, if statistical metrics continue to fragment and attack methods continue to evolve in a mixed manner, the next event that truly changes the industry narrative may not necessarily be the one with the largest historical amount, but rather an extremely covert, systemic breach that goes unnoticed for a long time—by the time the numbers are finally written into the monthly report, the story may already be irreversible.
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