BlockThreat - Week 45, 2026

Welcome to the weekly edition of BlockThreat, served completely free and open so that we can all learn from each week’s tough lessons and stay ahead of emerging threats. If you’re enjoying it, consider chipping in with a small contribution or advertising your blocksec related products and services. Both help keep the newsletter running.

Only four of this week’s 13 incidents were smart contract exploits and together they cost about $1.4M. The other nine accounted for roughly 97% of the $53.2M lost and came from infrastructure compromises, exchange hacks, opsec failures, and spear phishing. Crypto is now absorbing the fallout from the surge in traditional security exploitation. More details in the Hacks section below.

One trend to watch in particular is the targeting of backend signing and payment infrastructure, just as I predicted a few months ago. Mercado Bitcoin lost $48.6M to validly signed withdrawals from its own systems. A Web3Auth key-derivation flaw let attackers mass-drain Keplr social-login wallets. Gnosis Pay leaked customer PII and linked wallet addresses, outdated BTCPay Server instances lost $1.6M, and LNbits proactively told operators to shut down their servers. If you are an exchange or custodian, and especially if you run signing or payment rails, consider this your red flag: you are being targeted right now.

On the defense side, I invite you to read a great selection of articles in the Research - Defense section on how to approach vulnerability management, incident response, and security programs in general, from Tal Be’ery, the folks at a16z, Dino Dai Zovi, and others. The common thread is that patching faster can’t keep up with today’s flood of vulnerabilities. You will lose that race. Our only hope is to fundamentally rethink our systems to eliminate whole attack classes and stay resilient through inevitable compromises.

As is now a tradition, I want to celebrate the excellent research shared with the community this week: Katie Moussouris (Luta Security) on lessons from coordinating disclosure in this brave new world, Tal Be’ery’s case on dense vulnerabilities, Dickson’s study of where EVM chains quietly differ, SEAL’s advisory on the return of evil researchers (ahem… Nick L. Franklin), and many others. If you couldn’t make it to Devcon VII in India, I’ve gone through the schedule to find the best security talks in the Media section below (DeFi Security Summit recordings are coming soon). You can feel the curiosity, perseverance, and hard work in every one of the talks, papers, and tools sprinkled throughout this edition. Thank you for sharing!

News

• Hackers hijack a dozen DeFi websites, all registered with Name.com, and steal about $138,000.
• Web3Auth says it frontran hackers by moving $5.6 million out of exposed Keplr wallets.
• 2026 Fund Recovery Threat Landscape by Blockaid. Analysis of 60 major onchain exploits from 2026, tracing each stolen asset to where it sits today, covering attacker speed, exit routes, freeze channels, and what actually recovered funds.
• Tether and Tron Quietly Scrapped T3 Crime Unit Two Months Before $6.3 Billion Binance Hack
• Nubank Pauses Crypto Withdrawals and Deposits, Points to External Verification Provider. Let's just call it "Chainalysis".

News - Web2

• Is the Internet Rekt? by Rekt. On Black October, PHP2Shell, and everything in web2 getting hacked.
• “Black October” for AI Developer Platforms by Wiz. A series of agentic attacks on AI Developer Platforms has been leading to LLMJacking at scale.
• SSHole. Openssh on musl linux (alpine, openwrt, buildroot, yocto, and a lot of the docker images you've pulled) accepts any password longer than 256 characters.
• A JSON File, uvx, and an Unclaimed Package: The MCP Supply-Chain Trap by Penglyph Security.
• Implant reported in a Trezor sold by CryptoBilis by Trezor.
• Crypto Docs Host GitBook Hit by AI Agent Security Breach, Urges Users to Rotate Keys.

Crime - Enforcement

• Treasury cuts off MEXC Global over alleged $16 billion in transactions linked to Iran, North Korea and Russia.
• OFAC Designates Eight Canadian Money Services Businesses Under Operation Economic Outcast by TRM.
• Canadian Man Extradited to US Over Plot to Hijack University Supercomputers for Crypto. Prosecutors say Ryan Roach and a co-defendant targeted U.S. universities with supercomputers, stealing logins and secretly mining crypto.
• Former FBI Agent Pleads Guilty to Stealing $2.5M in Crypto From 35 Investigations. Patrick Yaroch drained wallets using credentials the FBI had collected, then asked ChatGPT for advice on starting a new life in Europe.
• ZachXBT Suspects Cover-Up as Tally on Suspected EU Theft Climbs to $133 Million. ZachXBT says a suspected theft from a European entity is larger than first thought, with more exchange withdrawals found.
• Former Holograph Employee Sentenced to Five Years for Stealing 1 Billion HLG Tokens. Five years in jail and €600K fine.

Crime - DPRK

• TraderTraitor vs Contagious Interview - A Look at Binance's Initial Incident Report by SEAL.
• North Korea Backdoored Their VS Code. npm Kept Bringing It Back by R.D.Tarun.
• Tracking Operational Changes in North Korean IT Work by Hayden McKenzie. A behind-the-scenes look at the operational changes North Korean IT workers are making in response to raids, identity checks and public reporting: company laptops flown to Pakistan, AI-training side work, and company ban lists.
• Suspected DPRK Campaign staging PHP2Shell Targeting against Global PHP infrastructure by CYFIRMA. Lazarus Group (DPRK)-Linked Operators Claim Exploitation of Two Critical PHP-Core RCE Vulnerabilities, Expanding Target Scope from 216 to 581 Hosts.
• Hunting Kimsuky: Multi-Language LNK Lures Delivering Persistent Backdoors at master by Nextron Systems.
• DPRK's Contagious Interview Meets ErrTraffic by Paul Newton. DPRK's Contagious Interview campaign appears to have started buying ClickFix traffic from ErrTraffic, a kit sold as a service, alongside its fake recruiter and fake interview lures. Every route delivers a portable Node.js loader that resolves its C2 from Polygon smart contracts labelled team1 to team10, plus a second npm.zip RAT kit with a hardcoded C2.
• U.S. OFAC Sanctions Individuals and Entities Linked to DPRK IT Worker Networks by SlowMist.
• DPRK Hackers Perfected Their Fake Interview Playbook Over Dozens of Attacks Before Binance by Chainalysis.
• Tracking Lazarus Group TraderTraitor Infrastructure Through Certificates and Historical Records by Michael Koczwara.
• The Confessions of an AI Fraud Kingpin by Joseph Cox. Yuriy Nazarenko created ‘OnlyFake’, a site that let anyone churn out realistic fake IDs with AI. Then the North Koreans came knocking.

Crime - Wrench

• French Crypto Holder Gets 30 Months in Prison for Shooting at Attackers. "By the time he fired, the gentleman was no longer in danger. The man had come down from the balcony. This is an act of revenge, not self-defense" according to the prosecutor. Self-defense can be tricky.

Policy

• Fed, OCC check US banks after Binance hack as experts flag security risks.

Phishing

• Advisory: Fake White-Hat Researchers Target Solana Protocols With Malicious Exploit PoCs by SEAL.
• Zero-click iOS exploits drain $4M USDT from active TRON wallets.

Scams

• The Vanishing Act by Rekt. Concerns about the wind down at Abracadabra.

Malware

• PolinRider Returns: Hijacked npm Packages Use Ethereum Blockchain to Conceal Malware Infrastructure by OX Security.
• Dead Domains, Live Exploits: How Infected Ads and Expired Analytics Tags Deliver Coruna and DarkSword to iPhones by iVerify.
• iPhone Wallet Drains: $4.06M USDT Taken From 365 Wallets by Bitquery.
• The Fearless Wallet browser extension is malicious with a threat exposure spanning nearly 20 months by SlowMist.

Media

• Private Keys: Crypto’s Original Sin, with Griff Green by Oak Security.
• Safely Giving AI Agents Access to Your Company with Docker Sandboxes by Mark Lechner (Docker).

Media - Devcon VII - 2026 - India

Hacks, incidents and fund flows

• Top hacks since Devcon SEA - what did we learn? by Matthias Egli, Mudit Gupta, Nicholas Rodrigues Lordello
• State of Web3 Security: Is the Worst Behind us or Ahead? by Kirk Baird, Mudit Gupta, Pablo Sabbatella, Julia Hardy, Georgy Kobakhidze
• What the Block Explorer Misses: Using Laundering Intel to Contain Exploits by Julia Hardy
• Hijacked at the registry: 26 hours without our domain by Anuj Bansal, Nuno Anselmo
• The $7.5M Sandwich Bot Hack: What Agent Transaction Security Requires by Kevin Jones
• How to steal $5M with a read-only bug by Bartosz Barwikowski
• From vanity to poison: the evolution of address poisoning attacks by Tong Yao, Varya Mosharova
• Decentralized Coordination & Responsible Disclosure with Millions at Stake by Matthias Egli, Griff Green, Samyak Jain, Deniz Yilmaz, Yannis Smaragdakis, Philippe Schommers
• Stop Re-Investigating the Same Wallet: A Shared Evidence Layer for On-Chain Crime by Dmytro Matviiv

Multisigs, wallets and signing

• Design for the Compromised Signer: Bounding Blast Radius in Smart Accounts by Dev Pramoth
• Security Through Clearing: The Timelock Model by Elliot Friedman
• Defending Multisigs from Offensive AI: Introducing onchain security markets by Rahul Rumalla
• Wallet Security: Past, Present & Future by Elliot Friedman, Rahul Rumalla, Robert, Joaquin Pereyra, Michael Lewellen
• Goodbye YOLO Signing by Kaan Uzdogan
• What You Sign Is What You Get: Ending Blind Signing with ERC-8009 by Mark Virchenko
• Beyond Clear Signing: What Else Should Wallets Do? by Michael
• What does it take to trust a transaction end to end? by Manuel Wedler
• Wallets and software supply chain security by polymutex

Smart contract and protocol vulnerability classes

• Oops, Your EOA Has Code Now: How EIP-7702 Broke Ethereum's Old Security Assumptions by Louis Tsai
• Glamsterdam Hard Fork: Out of gas, still running by Ioannis Sachinoglou
• Every Division Picks a Winner: Rounding and Accounting Hazards in Lending Protocols by Dhairya Sethi, Tomer Ganor
• Ten Ways DAOs Get Owned: A Governor Maintainer's Threat Model by Luiz Vasconcelos
• Wait! Reentracies are good now? by Dominic Bruetsch
• Training for Constraining: How to Prevent Circuit-Level Bugs by Levi Katyal Sledd, Vijay Singh
• 1,014 or 1.014: what breaks in tokenized asset feeds by Bianca Buzea
• Sybil Attacks on Inclusion List Mechanisms: FOCIL and AUCIL by Abhimanyu Nag
• Steal Now, Reveal Never: The Quiet Arrival of Quantum Attacks by Jon Stephens, Shankara Pailoor

AI on offense and defense

• Security by obscurity is dead: How LLMs can take over hardware by Péter Szilágyi
• AI security vulnerability scanning in Lighthouse by Josh King
• Red-Team Your Own AI Pipeline: A Hands-On Prompt-Injection & Supply-Chain Lab by Gustavo Dutra
• Permission, Not Possession: Setting Agent Wallet Defaults Before They Harden by Francesco Andreoli
• Nobody Verifies What Your Agent Reads by Denham
• Human + AI Solidity CTF: bring your own agent by Carlos Sánchez, Damian Martinelli
• Bug-Free Solidity Coding Agents by Mooly Sagiv
• Don't Review the Code: Formal Specs First Smart Contract Development by Dorde Mijovic

Supply chain, infrastructure and security practice

• Is this binary actually built from that public source code? by Soham Zemse
• Your TEE Workload Is Attested, Now What? A Practical Threat Model for CVMs by Igor Grachev
• Freeze Commit Security Reviews Can't Keep Up with Modern Development by Kirk Baird
• Tragedy of the Ethereum Security Commons by Griff Green, Josselin Feist
• Security Hub - How Do We Coordinate Ethereum Security? by Anamarija, Sem Bloom, Griff Green
• GrapheneOS Workshop: Secure by Design, Private by Default by GrapheneOS Core Team
• Trash Piracy: an Opsec Case Study by Eric DeCourcy

Waiting for recordings

• Securing Ethereum in the age of AI: Challenges & Opportunities by 0xRajeev, Vitalik Buterin, Fredrik Svantes, Mooly Sagiv, Josselin Feist
• Security is a leadership problem by Josselin Feist
• Vibe-Auditing: Why Your AI Security Review Isn't One by Nicolas Garcia
• Formal Verification in the Age of AI by Fricoben
• Keep your agents under control! by Dani Vilardell
• Smart Contract Security and Zero-Knowledge Assurance by Subhra Mazumdar, Sorbajit Goswami, Thikmanik

Vulnerabilities

• Solana Validator Kernel Bug Sparks Urgent Patch Warning.
• PSA on today's Reth / OP Reth releases A fix went out across the Reth ecosystem by Georgios Konstantopoulos. Reth’s legacy state root code had an edge case. For certain smart contract storage layouts, a carefully crafted transaction could make it produce the wrong state root.
• Architectural Flaw Report: Input Validation Failure & System Boundary Defects by fluffypill0w. A security research case study isolating an input validation failure and integration vulnerability within the TamaSwap router reference blueprint on Ethereum Mainnet. Interesting finding and an important note on the limits of formal verification.

Research - AI

• Introduction To Harness Engineering For Vulnerability Research by Graham Helton and Ryan Basden.
• Blockchain exploit increases from AI aren't just happening at the Smart Contract level by Chase.
• Patch the Planet, three lessons for DeFi from AI bug hunting by nisedo.
• Coding Agents Are Leaking Your Secrets to GitHub by Shmulik Cohen, Matan Giladi (Apiiro).
• A prompt is not a guardrail: We warned 50 AI agents about an attack. 48 still paid the attacker. by Jeremy DuCheny (Turnkey).
• Fuzzers vs. AI: Comparing Fuzzilli and BigSleep on JavaScript Engines by Samuel Groß (Google Project Zero).
• Backporting security fixes at scale with Codex by Artem Dinaburg (Trail of Bits).
• ETH Evals. We evaluate agents used by developers, and the models behind them, on real Ethereum work. Every task, trial and trajectory is public, allowing anyone to run the same tasks.

Research - Bug Hunting

• PHP2Shell: Multiparty Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure by Katie Moussouris (Luta Security). Critical lessons on mass scale vulnerability disclosure in the age of machine speed bugs.
• 2026 Lending Hacks: 7 in 10 Protocols Had Been Live Over a Year by Immunefi.
• Can Formally Verified Code Still Have Bugs? by Mooly Sagiv, Nisarg Patel, Chandrakana Nandi (Certora).
• Semantic Equivalence with the K Framework by Juan Conejero, Lucas Tabajara (Runtime Verification).
• Nightshade by Dickson. Static analysis for Compact smart contracts.
• Web Security Academy by PortSwigger. Free, online web security training from the creators of Burp Suite.

Research - EVM

• EVMish: where EVM-compatible chains quietly differ by Dickson. Repo here.
• Clear Signing Under the Hood: A Technical Guide to ERC-7730 by CertiK.

Research - Solana

• Auditing Smart Contracts on Solana: Security Checks by Tigran Piliposyan (Certora).

Research - Defense

• Dense in Depth: Rethinking Security When Vulns Are Everywhere by Tal Be'ery.
• Defense in Depth, Rebuilt for Machine Speed by Asaf Ezra and Steph Zhang (a16z).
• The Exploit Was the Bottleneck by Asaf Ezra and Steph Zhang (a16z).
• No Room for Bugs by Joseph M. Hellerstein.
• The Rise of Agentic Attacks: What They Look Like, and Where They're Headed by Avigayil Mechtinger (Wiz).
• The Rise of the Threat Operator: How AI Will Redefine Security Operations and Careers.
• A Note from Turnkey: What 2026 Revealed About Security and What's Ahead by Bryce Ferguson (Turnkey).
• If you're only working on vulnerability management, then you're only focusing on 1/3 of the problem by Dino A. Dai Zovi.

Whitepapers

• Proving the Wrong Program: Miscompilations as a Threat to zkVM Guarantees by Hui Xuan Tan, Stefanos Chaliasos, Alastair F. Donaldson
• Who Swept My ETH? Uncovering EIP-7702-Based Ether Redirection Attacks on Ethereum by Ziwei Li, Tianwei Chen, Jiajing Wu, Zigui Jiang, Yuhong Nan, Yaobo Huang, Bowen Song, Zibin Zheng
• Attack Patterns in Cross-chain Bridges: A Trust-based Empirical Analysis by Ishraq Samiha, Yasir Rahman, Rahma Mukta
• Price is Only the Symptom: Understanding and Analyzing Economic-State Manipulation Vulnerabilities in DeFi by Hao Wu, Haijun Wang, Xiapu Luo, Ming Fan, Ting Liu
• On-Chain Behavioral Signatures for Classifying Centralized Exchange Addresses on Ethereum Using Proof-of-Reserves by Seongchan Park, Hyunho Jeon, Byungsoo Kang, Gaeun Kim, Minseob So, Seongyong Kim
• Revisiting Elliptic++ for Bitcoin Forensics: Feature Reconstruction and Leakage-Resistant Evaluation by Runlin Liang, Simon Trimborn, Noud van Giersbergen
• Intent-Bound Authorization for Cryptocurrency Withdrawals Under Backend Compromise by Toqeer Ali Syed, Asadullah Abdullah Khan, Ali Akrama
• Argo: Leaking a Secret from an Invalid Groth16 Proof
• The Promise of Strategic Agentic Scambaiting by Abhishek Satyam, Hossein Siadati, Haadi Jafarian, Sima Jafarikhah, Juntao Chen

Tools

• Adventures in Automated Smart Contract Testing: Proving More of Spark's PSM with Echidna 2.4 by Gustavo Grieco.
• Release Echidna 2.4.0. Echidna 2.4.0 brings two major improvements: MCP support for interactive fuzzing and substantially improved symbolic execution. This release also improves Foundry compatibility, corpus reuse, and memory usage.
• Unlost: money left on Ethereum that is still yours. Check your Ethereum address for unclaimed funds in old contracts.
• hermetic by forefy. Hermetically seal hermes, enabling what was missing for security researchers

Tools - AI

• Bug Bounty Hunting Prompts by mdpsec. Reusable prompt files for building a structured, evidence-first web bug bounty hunting workflow.
• Claude-OSINT by elementalsouls. 8 Claude skills · 100+ recon capabilities · 80 secret-regex patterns · 80+ dorks · 9 read-only credential validators · 27 attack-path templates · ~10,000 lines of structured tradecraft.

Hacks

Detailed indicators of compromise including exploit transactions, attacker addresses, additional write ups, exploit PoCs are available upon request.

BitMart Compromise 2

Date: November 2, 2026
Attack Vector: Hot Wallet Compromise
Impact: $391,000
Chain: Base, Arbitrum, Optimism

https://x.com/m13_digital/status/2118038998694121787

King Compromise

Date: November 2, 2026
Attack Vector: Stolen Private Keys
Impact: $856,000
Chain: Solana, Ethereum

https://x.com/OnchainLens/status/2117318995460476935

Mercado Bitcoin Compromise

Date: November 2, 2026
Attack Vector: Hot Wallet Compromise
Impact: $48,600,000
Chain: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Base, Tron, Polygon, Solana, Stellar, Arbitrum, Avalanche, XDC, BSC

https://x.com/GoPlusSecurity/status/2117416296082211020

tradexyz Compromise

Date: November 2, 2026
Attack Vector: 3rd Party Compromise
Chain: Unknown

https://x.com/tradexyz/status/2117270210449183031

Gnosis Pay Compromise

Date: November 3, 2026
Attack Vector: Server Compromise
Chain: Unknown

https://protos.com/gnosis-pay-breach-exposes-customer-addresses/

InsurancePool Compromise

Date: November 3, 2026
Attack Vector: Price Oracle Manipulation
Impact: $179,500
Chain: BSC

https://x.com/TenArmorAlert/status/2117794176079376390

SignalPlus Compromise

Date: November 4, 2026
Attack Vector: Spear Phishing
Impact: $81,897
Chain: Bitcoin, BSC

https://x.com/SignalPlus_Web3/status/2118334759697068490

Enter Elysium Compromise

Date: November 5, 2026
Attack Vector: Stolen Private Keys
Chain: Unknown

https://x.com/the_smart_ape/status/2118103175253397630

Web3Auth Keplr Compromise

Date: November 5, 2026
Attack Vector: Leaked Private Keys
Impact: $1,820,000
Chain: Cosmos, Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, BSC, Polygon, HyperEVM

https://bitquery.io/investigations/keplr-wallet-hack

TENDRIL Compromise

Date: November 5, 2026
Attack Vector: Price Oracle Manipulation
Impact: $555,000
Chain: BSC

https://x.com/TenArmorAlert/status/2118237717574390001

Degen Token Compromise 2

Date: November 6, 2026
Attack Vector: Reward Manipulation
Impact: $10,000
Chain: Unknown

https://x.com/degencoinflip/status/2118555191599616042

ACryptoS Compromise

Date: November 8, 2026
Attack Vector: Function Parameter Validation
Impact: $665,000
Chain: Ethereum, Arbitrum, BSC, Polygon, Base, Optimism, Linea

https://docs.acryptos.com/post-mortem-univ3-family-vault-exploit-2026-11-08

LNbits Compromise

Date: November 8, 2026
Attack Vector: Server Compromise
Impact: $1,700
Chain: Bitcoin

https://x.com/lnbits/status/2119428804951048237