News linked to both this project and an event.
Odaily News Bybit today released its H1 2026 Risk and Security Report. Following the security incident in February 2025, Bybit has comprehensively upgraded its security architecture, transitioning toward a new defense model characterized by earlier detection, faster response, and continuous adaptation. Key highlights from the report are as follows:User Fund Protection: In H1, over 30,000 suspicious withdrawals were intercepted, protecting nearly 20,000 users from potential losses exceeding $700 million. The average initial review time was just 4.7 minutes (with 95% completed within 10 minutes).100% On-Chain Monitoring: Monitoring covers all business-related on-chain activities (including listed tokens, ecosystem contracts, and hot/cold wallets). In H1, 10 security incidents involving listed token projects were handled with zero platform losses; of these, responses to 8 incidents were faster than other major exchanges, and 2 attacks were detected before the project teams themselves. Additionally, approximately $212 million in potentially fraudulent on-chain funds was identified, and over 10,000 malicious addresses were blacklisted.AI-Driven Security Operations: More than 100,000 security alerts were processed. AI-assisted audits identified critical vulnerabilities at an efficiency 3-5 times that of manual efforts; the automated red team platform reduced the time from asset discovery to initial testing to within 24 hours (compared to weeks with traditional manual methods), and the cycle from security assessment to testing was shortened from two weeks to two hours.Accountability and Asset Recovery: In collaboration with law enforcement agencies and blockchain intelligence firms, stolen assets are being traced, and legal action has been taken against North Korea and the Lazarus Group to hold them accountable and recover funds.David Zong, Head of Risk Control and Security at Bybit Group, stated: "The cybersecurity arms race has entered the era of 'minute-level' response. Leveraging AI to strengthen risk control capabilities and ensuring the security of AI systems themselves is our top priority, but critical security decisions remain centered on human judgment."
Odaily News: The North Korean regime stole at least $2.8 billion in crypto assets between January 2024 and September 2025, increasingly laundering them through established criminal networks. According to a report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK-based defense and security think tank, the funds are believed to support its weapons programs. Stolen tokens frequently change ownership before being converted into cash, with third parties sometimes purchasing them at a discount or mixing them with proceeds from investment scams such as "pig butchering" schemes. Cashing out primarily relies on "money mules" recruited in the Philippines, Indonesia, and China, where stablecoins are typically split up and sold through peer-to-peer markets. After the Bybit hack, ZeroShadow found that TraderTraitor moved funds through over-the-counter (OTC) desks, peer-to-peer traders, and Chinese organized crime syndicates. Bybit has recovered $48.4 million and frozen $30.5 million in assets, accounting for roughly 5% of the stolen amount in total. (Decrypt)
Odaily News, Bybit announced today that it has officially filed a civil lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against North Korea (DPRK), its Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), and the Lazarus Group, holding the organization legally accountable for the大规模 cyberattack launched against Bybit in February 2025.It is reported that Bybit has successfully obtained a preliminary injunction from the court, freezing identified stolen digital assets held or transferred by unidentified individuals and entities (i.e., "John Doe" defendants). In approving the preliminary temporary restraining order, the court described the incident as "one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts in history" and determined that Bybit has a "likelihood of success on the merits" of the case. This civil lawsuit is independent of criminal investigations by U.S. law enforcement and aims to provide an additional legal avenue for asset recovery.In terms of asset recovery and global collaboration, Bybit has achieved notable results in partnership with blockchain analytics firms, multiple exchanges, custodial institutions, and international law enforcement agencies. To date:Approximately $48.4 million in stolen assets have been successfully recovered;Approximately $30.5 million in involved assets have been successfully frozen (distributed across more than 28 exchanges and custodial institutions).These efforts have also supported broader law enforcement actions targeting key infrastructure allegedly used to launder stolen funds: German authorities have dismantled cryptocurrency exchange eXch; German and Swiss authorities subsequently jointly shut down mixing platform Cryptomixer.io, cutting off critical channels for transferring illicit proceeds. These actions collectively demonstrate the effectiveness of collaboration between the private sector and law enforcement agencies in combating transnational cybercrime.Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit, stated: "Our core goal has never changed: prioritizing user protection, making every effort to recover assets, and ensuring those behind this are held accountable under the law. The Lazarus attack was not only directed at Bybit, but also a challenge to the trust foundation of the entire crypto industry. We will continue to deepen cooperation with law enforcement agencies, regulatory authorities, and courts to make the crypto world a place where criminals find it difficult to hide."Bybit emphasized that it will continue to invest in advanced blockchain tracking technology, utilize all available legal means to combat state-sponsored hacker groups, and drive the establishment of a more resilient digital asset ecosystem. The civil lawsuit is currently ongoing.
Odaily News: Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has filed a civil lawsuit against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, its intelligence agency Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), and the state-sanctioned hacker group Lazarus Group over a $1.5 billion hacking incident. A U.S. federal court has issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the transfer or dissipation of identified assets related to the case during the litigation.
In the first half of 2026, losses from hacker attacks on cryptocurrency projects have exceeded $1 billion, with the number of verified attack incidents reaching a record high for the same period in history, described as "the half-year with the most hacker attacks on record." However, in terms of value, overall losses remain lower than the same period last year, mainly because a $1.5 billion attack incident occurred at Bybit in 2025, raising the baseline.
According to on-chain analyst PeckShield (@PeckShieldAlert), the address labeled "Drift Exploiter" has deposited 23,095.1 ETH (approximately $44.4 million) into Tornado Cash for mixing, and additionally transferred 0.85 ETH to Bybit.
According to an official post from Midnight Foundation (@midnightfdn), the Wanchain Cardano<>BNB cross-chain bridge suffered a security attack. Currently, multiple major exchanges including KuCoin, Kraken, Binance, Bybit, OKX, and MEXC have responded rapidly, taking preventive measures to restrict the flow of stolen assets, including freezing relevant accounts and addresses, blacklisting the attacker's wallets, and suspending NIGHT token deposit and withdrawal services. The exchanges confirmed that this incident is an isolated third-party bridge vulnerability and is unrelated to the Midnight Network mainnet and the NIGHT asset itself.
the Midnight Foundation has provided an update on the handling of the cross-chain bridge attack event involving Wanchain Cardano and BNB. Multiple exchanges including KuCoin, Kraken, Binance, Bybit, OKX, Gate, and MEXC have coordinated risk control actions, temporarily freezing the involved accounts and associated addresses, adding the hacker wallet to a blacklist, and pausing NIGHT token deposits and withdrawals as needed to curb the transfer and cashing out of stolen assets.The Foundation specifically noted that this security incident is an isolated incident related to a third-party cross-chain bridge, and the Midnight mainnet and native NIGHT assets have not been affected. The project team continues to collaborate with major exchanges and ecosystem partners to advance traceability investigations, reminding the community to rely on official disclosures for information and to be cautious of misinformation.
According to monitoring by on-chain analyst PeckShield (@PeckShieldAlert), the public OLP vault of decentralized perpetual contract protocol Ostium (@Ostium) was attacked, with approximately 24 million USDC stolen. The attacker subsequently swapped the stolen funds for 12,080 ETH and has transferred 10,540 ETH into the mixer Tornado Cash to obscure the fund flow. On-chain tracing shows that the attacker's initial funds originated from ChangeNow and Bybit, with 1 ETH transferred from each to the attacker's wallet (0x321D...8bfD9).
Dragonfly 管理合伙人 Haseeb Qureshi（@hosseeb）在 X 平台发文，距 OpenZeppelin 创始人 Manuel Aráoz 发出"DeFi 全面不安全"警告已过去两个月，数据显示所谓"黑客末日"并未成真。 数据显示，2026年 DeFi 被盗金额年化值低于 2025 年全年，即便剔除异常月份（如 Bybit 黑客事件、Drift 及 KelpDAO 事件）后对比，2026 年每月被盗金额仍低于 2025 年；按 TVL 标准化后，2026年 DeFi 资金被盗比例同样略低于 2025 年。 Haseeb 指出，当前呈现出"攻击次数上升、单次规模下降"的结构性特征——攻击者主要针对无力承担 AI 安全加固成本的小型协议和废弃项目，而已完成 AI 代码加固的大型协议安全性实际上有所提升。他总结称，"DeFi 中平均每一美元的安全性与一年前持平，将资金存放于大型协议大概率是安全的。"
Odaily, Web3 security firm CertiK has released the "Hack3D: First Half of 2026 Report." The report shows that the Web3 ecosystem experienced 344 security incidents in the first half of 2026, with cumulative losses of approximately $1.32 billion. Although this figure represents a 46.8% decrease compared to the same period last year, excluding the impact of the $1.45 billion security incident involving Bybit, the scale of losses in the first half of this year actually increased by approximately 28% year-on-year, indicating that the overall security environment in the industry has not materially improved.The report points out that wallet theft has become the attack type causing the greatest financial loss, accounting for approximately $450 million in losses in the first half of the year. Meanwhile, although the number of phishing attacks fell by more than 50% year-on-year, the loss amount only decreased by approximately 10.8%, reflecting that attackers are shifting towards high-net-worth individuals and institutional targets, carrying out more targeted high-value attacks.Furthermore, code vulnerabilities remain the most frequent type of attack, with 204 related incidents. CertiK believes that attackers are increasingly targeting long-running legacy smart contracts that lack re-audits. The report also shows that mega-attacks continue to dominate industry losses, with the Kelp DAO and Drift Protocol incidents alone causing approximately $577 million in losses, accounting for 44% of the total losses in the first half of the year. Looking at the number of incidents, the impact of single attacks, and the changing attack patterns, the Web3 industry is facing more complex and continuously escalating security challenges.
CertiK warned that the decline in losses was primarily due to a single massive Bybit hack incident worth $1.4 billion during the same period last year; excluding this factor, attacks are becoming "more targeted and more destructive per incident," with private key and multi-signature wallet management remaining the most critical security risk exposures.
According to The Wall Street Journal, blockchain public-chain data analysis shows that Iranian entities have conducted over $3.84 billion in transactions via the cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx to circumvent U.S. economic sanctions. Investigators traced funds linked to two digital wallets controlled by the Central Bank of Iran and found connections to the $1.5 billion stolen by North Korean hackers from the Bybit exchange. After flowing through complex, multi-layered transaction paths, these funds ultimately entered CoinEx—making it one of the central channels through which Iran uses cryptocurrencies to bypass sanctions.
Odaily, Mitchell Amador, CEO of bug bounty platform Immunefi, stated at the WAIB Summit that new AI models such as Claude Opus 4.8 and ChatGPT 5.5 are shifting the balance of cybersecurity offense and defense in favor of attackers, leading to a resurgence in crypto hacks in 2026. Data from DefiLlama shows that in April 2026, illicit actors stole over $634 million from crypto platforms, the highest monthly total since the Bybit hack in February 2025 drove losses of approximately $1.4 billion.Amador stated that the crypto industry is in a critical survival period for the next three to four years until security teams leverage similar AI models to build codebases that attackers cannot breach; if the industry adopts more crowd-sourced security solutions, this timeline could be shortened to within two years. The latest Claude Mythos model, Fable 5, from AI company Anthropic, previously raised concerns about accelerating the ability to exploit crypto vulnerabilities.Anthropic stated that Fable 5 has safeguards in place that will redirect topics related to cybersecurity and similar fields to Claude Opus 4.8. On April 19, an attacker transferred approximately 116,500 restaked Ethereum (rsETH) from Kelp DAO's LayerZero-based rsETH bridge, valued at around $290 million to $293 million at the time. Cross-chain protocol LayerZero stated that the 1/1 decentralized verification network configuration of Kelp DAO relied on a single verification path for processing cross-chain messages, creating a single point of failure. (Cointelegraph)
AML/KYT provider Shard disclosed that the number of cyberattacks targeting the cryptocurrency industry in Q1 2026 doubled year-on-year, exceeding 80 incidents; however, total losses declined by 69% year-on-year to $496 million, down from $1.6 billion in the same period last year. Shard noted that losses in Q1 2025 were primarily driven by a major theft incident involving Bybit, valued at approximately $1.4 billion; in contrast, attacks in Q1 2026 were more dispersed, targeting DeFi protocols, infrastructure services, and individual users. On a monthly basis: 29 attacks occurred in January, causing losses exceeding $392 million; 26 attacks occurred in February, causing losses exceeding $22 million; and 27 attacks occurred in March, causing losses exceeding $81 million.
According to on-chain investigator Eye, DxSale is suspected of withdrawing approximately $7.3 million from some of its early liquidity pools locked on BNB Chain since 2021—impacting over 1,400 LPs. Eye stated that the attack involved silent ownership transfers and over 80 wallet hops. Eye noted that the newly used wallet address in the attack received 104 BNB from Bybit 20 hours prior to the liquidity pool withdrawal, and subsequently received approximately 1,200 BNB after the funds were withdrawn from the liquidity pools. Thereafter, this address transferred roughly 3,400 BNB in total to two wallets, with the related funds already withdrawn via multiple Binance deposit addresses.
According to an official announcement, Bybit recently completed an innovative anti-money laundering (AML) research collaboration with a student team from The University of Hong Kong (HKU). This collaboration used Bybit’s February 2025 security incident as a case study, providing HKU Business School master’s students with hands-on experience in blockchain investigations and AML analysis.
Ronghui Gu, co-founder and CEO of CertiK, stated that AI tools are exacerbating the imbalance between attack and defense in DeFi security, making it easier for attackers to discover vulnerabilities and replicate attack paths across different protocols.He pointed out that the DeFi security situation was particularly severe in April of this year, with only 3 days that month free from hacker attacks, resulting in cumulative losses exceeding $690 million for DeFi protocols. Excluding the Bybit attack in February 2025, April has become the month with the highest losses from DeFi hacks since March 2022.Ronghui Gu believes that attackers can concentrate significant computing power to repeatedly test a single protocol, whereas security companies need to serve multiple clients simultaneously with dispersed resources, putting the defense side at a natural disadvantage. Meanwhile, the focus of recent attacks is also shifting from smart contract vulnerabilities to operational security and weak points in the supply chain.He emphasized that even if AI fails to find vulnerabilities over an extended period, it does not prove the code is completely secure; under current technical conditions, formal verification remains a more reliable method for ensuring security.
Odaily, Web3 security firm CertiK has released the "Skynet North Korean Crypto Threat Report." Data shows that since 2016, North Korean hacking groups have accumulated approximately $6.75 billion in stolen digital assets. In 2025 alone, their thefts amounted to $2.06 billion in losses, accounting for nearly 60% of the total annual losses in the global crypto industry (including the $1.5 billion Bybit hack). As of early 2026, this threat trend continues, with losses attributable to them making up about 55%.The report emphasizes that the North Korean hackers' attack patterns have fundamentally shifted, evolving from mere code vulnerability exploitation into a state-level attack system combining social engineering, deep supply chain attacks, and 'physical infiltration.' In the recent Drift protocol incident, attackers even spent six months infiltrating offline industry conferences, building trust through real financial transactions and personal interactions before launching the attack.CertiK security experts warn that in the face of such systemic attacks, purely technical defenses are proving inadequate. Crypto institutions urgently need to fully implement a 'zero-trust' hiring model, reinforce third-party supply chains, establish fund circuit breaker mechanisms, and collaborate with professional security firms to build a full lifecycle defense system covering code auditing, round-the-clock risk monitoring, and on-chain anti-money laundering/KYT (Know Your Transaction) fund tracking.
Odaily Odaily PaperImperium, the head of MegaETH, disclosed on X platform that documents from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York show that a U.S. court has issued an injunction against the Arbitrum DAO, prohibiting it from transferring approximately $71 million in ETH assets that were previously frozen during the KelpDAO hacking incident. In response, on-chain detective ZachXBT posted on X platform, stating that certain U.S. law firms are using his investigative work and on-chain forensics to help victims of some hacking incidents file legal claims. However, this practice may actually slow down or hinder victims from receiving compensation or recovering funds.ZachXBT added that in previous hacking incidents involving the Lazarus Group, such law firms often stepped in after on-chain fund tracking or freezing was completed, proposing subsequent legal actions that were weakly related to the crypto incidents themselves. Similar "free-riding claims" strategies were used in events like Harmony and Bybit. He called on the crypto community to establish a DAO to resist such practices.