BlockThreat - Week 14, 2026
DPRK plays the long game, multiple supply chain attacks, DNS hijackings, DeFi hacker arrested, money printing vulnerabilities patched
This week’s losses reached $290M across 14 incidents, with DPRK activity once again forcing defenders to rethink our threat models and confront just how dangerous our adversaries have become.
The Drift Protocol hack alone, at roughly $285M, exceeded the losses from the entire first quarter. This was not a quick smash and grab. It was a sophisticated social engineering campaign that unfolded over six months and involved fake identities, in person contact, a $1M investment to build credibility, and legitimate code contributions. Once enough trust had been established, the attackers went straight for the jugular: the project’s multisig. One signer was compromised through a malicious cloned repository, while another installed a fake mobile wallet app through TestFlight. After securing the 2/5 quorum, the attackers drained the protocol and laundered funds with almost mechanical efficiency.
If that sounds familiar, it is because we have seen versions of this before with Radiant Capital, Bybit, and other victims of a regime hellbent on extracting money from our industry. The North Korean group behind this operation is known by several names including UNC4736, AppleJeus, Citrine Sleet, and others. I talked about this group's tactics and capabilities in my The State of Defi Security talk.
We previously got a glimpse of this long game with the Nick L. Franklin operation that was unraveled precisely one year ago. But the Drift compromise pushed that tradecraft to a new level. Meeting targets in person at conferences, building rapport over months, contributing legitimate assets and code, and carefully positioning malware only after trust is established is the kind of operation one would expect against a nation state target, not a DeFi project. Even the timing was perfect. The attack landed on April 1, when defenders were primed to dismiss hack reports as pranks and many were distracted by EthCC conference.
And yet this is the reality now. Our threat models need to catch up.
The immediate step is to return to fundamentals and ask what technical controls could have made this attack harder to execute:
- A 2/5 multisig is not sufficient protection for a system facing existential risk.
- No timelock, and no separate guardian or emergency controls outside the same multisig, left little chance for last ditch recovery.
- Developers keeping signer access on daily use machines was a deadly mistake.
- Incident responders also appear to have wasted valuable time negotiating with attackers, fundamentally misunderstanding who they were dealing with.
To appreciate the scale of the adversary facing this industry, consider that while one team was executing the Drift hack, another group of operators were busy with a broad supply chain campaign targeting individual developers. The Axios supply chain attack last week followed the same pattern: a patient attacker building trust over time before convincing a developer to install malware through a backdoored cloned repository (more details in the news section). We know of at least one victim who lost $2.1M, and there are likely more.
The exact lessons and security controls (such as SEAL's excellent multisig framework) from these incidents will change as attack paths evolve. But the larger principle is becoming unavoidable:
They must be built to survive the compromise of multiple developers, parts of the codebase, and even some signing infrastructure without leading to catastrophic loss. If the compromise of one or two components can end your protocol, then your defenses are not built for the type of adversaries that we face in this industry.
This is another Bybit-like moment that should force the ecosystem to level up.
Beyond extensive coverage of those two incidents, this week’s edition also looks at a wave of DNS hijackings and what teams should do immediately, the latest on quantum risk, other notable supply chain attacks, a horrifying wrench attack in San Francisco, standout security talks from recent conferences, latest arrests of DeFi hackers and scammers, and, as always, a deep stack of research papers on bug hunting, writeups for the other 12 incidents from last week, and tools to help protect yourself before the next major hack.
Let’s dive into the news.
News
- Phrack Call for Papers is out! Got some epic DeFi attack vectors up your sleeve? Submit your research and etch your name into hacking legend.
- Circle under fire as $230M in stolen USDC flows unblocked days after freezing legitimate accounts.
- Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly by Google Quantum AI. Google estimates 2029 as the deadline for blockchains to become quantum proof.
- Going to finish formally verifying the compiler this month! by Vyper.
News - Web2
- Reports of .fi registar likely compromised. Multiple crypto domains hijacked, it's to move off .fi domains.
- MAD Bugs: vim vs emacs vs Claude by Calif. RCE vulnerabilities in Vim and Emacs. Patch now.
- Inside the Axios supply chain compromise - one RAT to rule them all by Elastic Security. DPRK's UNC1069 campaign targeting cryptocurrency industry.
- Post Mortem: axios npm supply chain compromise · Issue #10636 · axios/axios. Details of the social engineering attack involved in the developer compromise.
- Thirty-Six Malicious npm Strapi Packages Deploy Redis RCE, Database Theft, and Persistent C2 by SafeDep.
- New supply chain attack vector that I found WILD by Basel Ismail. AI LLMs hallucinate package names roughly 18-21% of the time. Hackers have started pre-registering those hallucinated names on PyPI and npm with malicious payloads; they call it "slopsquatting".
- People in china are getting their colleagues fired by secretly training AI agents to replace them by Ejaaz.
- Claude code source code has been leaked via a map file in their npm registry! by Chaofan Shou.
- Cisco source code stolen in Trivy-linked dev environment breach.
- Intel SGX has fallen! Its most important key is in our hands: we extracted the Global Wrapping Key from an instance of the Intel Gemini Lake platform by Mark Ermolov.
- Security Bug Bounty Program Paused Due to Loss of Funding by Node.js.
Crime
- Maryland Man Charged With Defrauding Crypto Exchange Of Over $50 Million In Hacks. DoJ just nabbed Jonathan Spalletta aka Cthulhon for the 2025 Uranium Finance hack. As was pointed out Specter, ZachXBT's analysis last year was indeed spot on!
- Latest news about Andean Medjedovic:
- Ten Fraudsters from Four Financial Services Firms Charged in Different Cryptocurrency Market Manipulation Schemes Out of Northern District of California. More charges from Operation Token Mirrors, the DOJ's undercover investigation into cryptocurrency market manipulation.
- Crypto dispute over Resupply exploit lands in Singapore harassment court.
- Alleged Huione money-laundering boss extradited to China.
- The Old Bitcoin Whale That Destroyed a Government by StarPlatinum. The saga of Sheep Marketplace and 468 BTC "donation" to the Czech Government.
Crime - DPRK
- North Korea-Nexus Threat Actor Compromises Widely Used Axios NPM Package in Supply Chain Attack by Mandiant.
- Attackers Are Hunting High-Impact Node.js Maintainers in a Coordinated Social Engineering Campaign by Sarah Gooding.
- A note on Lazarus Group taxonomy by ZachXBT. Different threat actors with unique tactics under the same umbrella.
- There is likely another large scale compromise coming. DPRK (UNC1069) Fake "Microsoft Teams" domain onlivemeet[.]com by Security Alliance. Always inspect destination URLs. URL displayed in applications such as Telegram or Slack may not match the destination URL.
Crime - Wrench Attack
- Fake deliveries, then guns: How a ‘wrench attack’ crime ring chased crypto millions from S.F. to L.A. by Megan Cassidy (San Francisco Chronicle).
Policy
- Senator raises alarm following former SEC enforcement lead’s short tenure, decision to drop Justin Sun charges.
- KuCoin operator ordered to block US traders, pay $500,000 CFTC penalty.
Phishing
- Kraken User Loses $18.2M in Crypto Social Engineering Attack as Funds Move via Thorchain: ZachXBT.
- Reports of Aptos/Sui Martian wallet compromise.
Scams
Malware
- CrystalX RAT can flip your screen and steal your crypto by Kaspersky.
- Ransomware with a Twizt: Inside the Phorpiex Botnet by Bitsight. The malware includes crypto wallet clipboard hijacking.
- EtherRAT & SYS_INFO Module: C2 on Ethereum (EtherHiding), Target Selection, CDN-Like Beacons by eSentire.
Media
- [un]prompted - The AI security practitioners' conference.
- EthCC[9] - 2026 - Security Talks
- Hester Bruikman (Ethereum Foundation) - Trillion Dollar Security (1TS) for Ethereum
- Bianca Buzea (Chronicle) - Strengthening Oracle Security in 2026: Key Principles for Builders
- Dyma Budorin (Hacken) - Security Is Infrastructure: Designing Resilient Systems for Ethereum's Future
- Tomer Ganor (Certora) — Designing DeFi Resilience: Inside Aave V4 Security Blueprint
- Ece Orsel (Hacken) - An Offensive Security View to Cross Chain Bridge Security
- Charles Cooper (Vyper) - Formal Verification and the Holy Grail of Software Correctness
- Jon Stephens (Veridise) - Live State Fuzzing: Testing Live Deployments Proactively
- Mooly Sagiv (Certora) - AI Composer - Safe Vibe Coding
- Andy M. Lee (Mamori) - AI Fuzzing: From Stochastic Chaos to ...
- btchip (zknox) - Building a unified Ethereum experience for Hardware Signers
- Pamina Georgiev (Certora) - Designing Solidity Contracts That Don't Fight Verification
- Three Buddy Problem - LLMs Writing Exploits, Engineers Losing Skills, Generative OSes.
Vulnerabilities
- Zcash Vulnerability Successfully Remediated by Zooko Wilcox, Daira-Emma Hopwood, Jack “str4d” Grigg, Judah Caruso, Jason McGee, and Josh Swihart, Shielded Labs, Zcash Open Development Lab. Could allow malicious miners to drain 25K ZEC ($6.5M) from a deprecated Sprout shielded pool.
- Tricking the Polygon bridge into withdrawals by forging transaction proofs by Hexens.
- The 30th Bug: A Novel Finding, that the CTF Designers Missed by 0xjustuzair. A finding in the MetaLend (Solana) audit.
Research - AI
- Vuln Research is NOT Cooked but is Continuously Reborn Raw by GCU Tense Correction.
- Vulnerability Research Is Cooked by sockpuppet.
- Mutation testing for the agentic era by Bo Henderson (Trail of Bits).
- How we made Trail of Bits AI-native (so far) by Dan Guido (Trail of Bits).
- Google Researchers Reveal Every Way Hackers Can Trap, Hijack AI Agents.
- Design and Analysis of LLM-Based Smart Contract Auditing: A Slippage Vulnerability by fffuuuming (OneSavie).
- Hardening OpenClaw on Aleph Cloud: Step by Step Defence for Frontier AI Agents by Hacken.
- A thread on AI sycophancy by unsafe_call.
- A thread on fully autonomous AI auditing future by p_misirov.
- The Golden Age of DeFi is Coming by nour. Another overly optimistic view on AI and security.
- My self-sovereign / local / private / secure LLM setup, April 2026 by Vitalik.
Research - Bug Hunting
- Assumptions: The Root of All Bugs by Flint.
- How to Find vulnerabilitys So Creative It Feels Illegal by hamidonsolo.
Research - Contests
- MiniCTF! I made a full redesign of my website (with slOpus and love) and placed 7 flags to claim by ustas.eth.
Research - Cryptography
Research - Defense
- How to Multisig. Best practices on how to implement secure standard operation procedures for multisigs.
- Drift Protocol's $285M Hack: Why Transaction Legibility Is the Fix.
Research - EVM
Research - Solana
- Under the Hood of Solana Program Execution: From Rust Code to SBF Bytecode.
- ctrus (@ctrusonchain) on X - 51 Solana Intricacies and Heuristics - An auditor's guide.
Research - Stellar
- Monolithic Oracle: A Real Soroban(Rust) Audit Case Study by Farouk ELALEM.
- Beyond the EVM: Understanding Soroban’s Three-Tier Storage Architecture by 0xjustuzair.
Research - Web2
- Mitigating supply chain attacks by pnpm.
Research - ZKVM
- Making Sense of ZK Virtual Machines by Farouk ELALEM.
Whitepapers
- ORACAL: A Robust and Explainable Multimodal Framework for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection with Causal Graph Enrichment.
- Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations.
- SmartPoC: Generating Executable and Validated PoCs for Smart Contract Bug Reports.
- LibScan: Smart Contract Library Misuse Detection with Iterative Feedback and Static Verification.
- ContractShield: Bridging Semantic-Structural Gaps via Hierarchical Cross-Modal Fusion for Multi-Label Vulnerability Detection in Obfuscated Smart Contracts.
Tools
- Solana Ecosystem Multisig Library. Verified multisig addresses for Solana DeFi protocols.
Hacks
Detailed indicators of compromise including exploit transactions, attacker address, exploit PoCs are available upon request.
DayContract Compromise
Date: March 30, 2026
Attack Vector: Price Oracle Manipulation
Impact: $10,600
Chain: BSC
https://x.com/exvulsec/status/2038606487581495329
Steakhouse Compromise
Date: March 30, 2026
Attack Vector: DNS Hijacking
Chain: Ethereum
https://x.com/SteakhouseFi/status/2038565540625543406
LML Compromise
Date: March 31, 2026
Attack Vector: Price Oracle Manipulation
Impact: $950,000
Chain: BSC
https://x.com/PeckShieldAlert/status/2039213467933229099
InfinitySix Compromise
Date: March 31, 2026
Attack Vector: Price Oracle Manipulation
Impact: $273,000
Chain: Unknown
https://x.com/AMLBotHQ/status/2038882575859552399
Axios Supply Chain Attack
Date: March 31, 2026
Attack Vector: Supply Chain
Impact: $2,100,000
Chain: Ethereum
https://github.com/axios/axios/issues/10636
Drift Protocol Compromise
Date: April 1, 2026
Attack Vector: Multisig Hijacking
Impact: $285,000,000
Chain: Solana
https://x.com/mert/status/2039391215284519045
Galaxy Digital
Date: April 1, 2026
Attack Vector: Stolen Private Keys
Impact: $10,000
Chain: Unknown
Trust Wallet Discord Link Hijacking
Date: April 1, 2026
Attack Vector: Discord Server
Chain: Unknown
https://t.me/investigations/309
SAS Compromise
Date: April 2, 2026
Attack Vector: Insufficient Function Access Control
Impact: $10,000
Chain: BSC
https://x.com/exvulsec/status/2039551675250425986
HypuurFi DNS Hijacking 2
Date: April 3, 2026
Attack Vector: DNS Hijacking
Chain: HyperEVM
https://x.com/HypurrFi/status/2040114754799251694
Silo Finance Compromise 2
Date: April 3, 2026
Attack Vector: Incorrect Price Oracle
Impact: $392,000
Chain: Arbitrum
https://x.com/SiloFinance/status/2040198190176018445
TMM Pool Compromise
Date: April 4, 2026
Attack Vector: Price Oracle Manipulation
Impact: $1,665,000
Chain: BSC
https://x.com/exvulsec/status/2040649377803546859
QuickSwap Discord Compromise
Date: April 5, 2026
Attack Vector: Discord Server
Chain: Ethereum
https://x.com/QuickswapDEX/status/2041035664217473069
Denaria Compromise
Date: April 5, 2026
Attack Vector: Reward Manipulation
Impact: $165,000
Chain: Linea