The sleuths who protect cryptocurrencies from hackers are raking in money

business-standard.com:

At a time when many crypto companies have seen their fortunes plummet, one corner of the industry is thriving.

With criminals, including North Korean hackers, increasingly targeting the sprawling software infrastructure underpinning the cryptosphere, firms that sift through code for weaknesses and run bug-hunting sites are finding themselves with more business than they can handle. As mass firings become the norm elsewhere in crypto, they’re boosting hiring, raising prices and taking in fresh funding.

Their rising fortunes underscore how the industry is waking up to the threat of sophisticated hackers who have stolen roughly $2 billion from digital-asset protocols this year, according to researcher Chainalysis, which says such attacks show few signs of slowing.

With so much at stake, crypto security services are moving from the “nice to have” spending category to the “must have” bucket, even for bootstrapping start-ups and community-driven projects.

“We have spent sooooo much money on audits,” Paul Frambot, chief executive officer of crypto startup Morpho Labs, said by text message. “Security is, in my opinion, not taken sufficiently seriously in DeFi,” he added, referring to decentralised finance, where people trade, borrow and lend crypto without a central intermediary.

Investors are taking note of the growing demand for protection. Venture capital firms have poured $257 million into crypto auditing and security companies so far this year, up from $185 million for all of 2021, according to CB Insights.

Rising threat

Crypto thieves have stalked the industry for most of its roughly decade-long existence, from the Bitfinex exchange hack in 2016 to last year’s exploit of the PolyNetwork protocol.

But the problem has