Crypto Bloodbath: May Sees $244M in Hacks—While Sui and Cetus Pull Off $157M Rescue

Another month, another nine-figure crypto heist—but this time, the white hats clawed back some ground.

Hackers siphoned $244 million from DeFi protocols in May, proving yet again that blockchain’s ’trustless’ utopia still has a trust problem. Meanwhile, Sui and Cetus managed to recover $157 million of the stolen loot—a rare win in an ecosystem where stolen funds usually vanish faster than a trader’s profits during a leverage wipeout.

Finance jab of the day: At least crypto hackers file their thefts faster than Wall Street execs report their ’accidental’ insider trades.

Cetus exploit dominates monthly losses

The Cetus Protocol incident was the largest single hack of the month and accounted for the majority of losses. According to blockchain security firm Dedaub, attackers exploited a vulnerability in the most significant bits check mechanism.

This allowed them to manipulate liquidity parameters by substantial margins and establish disproportionately large positions with minimal effort.

While hackers successfully looted $220 million from the protocol, approximately $63 million remains in the exploiter’s wallet, with the remainder frozen through validator coordination.

The remaining top exploits of the month included Cork Protocol losing $12 million. A purported North Korean-affiliated strike that caused losses of $5.2 million came next.

The MBU token suffered a $2.2 million exploit, while MapleStory Universe experienced a $1.2 million breach and rounded out the top five incidents.

Despite the major absolute losses, May’s figures are an improvement over previous months in the context of 2025’s overall security losses.

More than $1.63 billion worth of cryptocurrencies was stolen in the first quarter of this year. Additionally, PeckShield said that almost 92% of all losses at that time were caused by the Bybit vulnerability.

January’s security incidents resulted in over $87 million in stolen cryptocurrency, while February experienced a surge to $1.53 billion. This was primarily driven by the massive Bybit attack that ranks among the largest crypto thefts in history.