The quarterly shift toward contract losses and September's Bitget and Liquid failures challenge a fixed hierarchy of security controls.
Hacken's third-quarter crypto hack total rose to $1.18 billion while the losses implied by its access-control and operational figures fell about 30%.
The crypto security firm's Oct. 15 disclosure reports a 55% increase in total theft for July-September compared with the second quarter.
The change included 48% more losses from smart contracts in the third quarter, up from about 11% in Hacken's original second-quarter summary. More incidents, alongside a slightly smaller mean recorded loss per incident, also distinguish the two quarters. The figures challenge a fixed security hierarchy that makes custody operations the overriding priority.
Bitget's September report showed forged withdrawal instructions without private-key compromise, while Liquid's report from the same month accepted invalid assets before a genuine authorization process released Bitcoin against them.
Hacken's second-quarter summary recorded $763.9 million extracted across 67 incidents, attributing 88.3% of losses to compromised keys, signers, and infrastructure.
Multiplying those figures gives approximately $675 million, while applying the 40% share for the third quarter to $1.18 billion gives approximately $472 million, about 30% less.
The third-quarter report calls its category access-control and operational failures, while the second-quarter report describes operational failures.
The third-quarter 48% share implies about $566 million, compared with roughly $84 million using the second-quarter original 11% share.
That discrepancy, rounded inputs, and uncertain detailed category comparability rule out a precise growth multiple, but the published mix points to much heavier contract losses.
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