Blockchain Security Brief
The weekly record of web3 darkest hours
Monday, October 27, 2025
Top Exploits
From collapsing clouds to collapsing credibility, this week exposed how fragile crypto’s “infrastructure revolution” really is.
AWS sneezed, and half of crypto caught the flu. On October 20th, a failure in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region froze Coinbase, glitched Robinhood, and bricked six major Layer 2s - Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, Linea, and Scroll - all within minutes. Ethereum kept producing blocks, Bitcoin didn’t blink, yet users found themselves locked out of “trustless” finance because Jeff Bezos’ servers hiccuped. Infura went dark, MetaMask disconnected, and Coinbase admitted it’s “reorganizing services” to avoid future outages - code for “we built DeFi on AWS.” Crypto promised censorship resistance, but it’s still running on three cloud providers and a prayer. (Read more)
Kadena promised to bring Wall Street discipline to crypto - and ended up proving why Wall Street leaves. Once valued at over $3 billion and hailed as an “institutional-grade” proof-of-work marvel, it shut down in October after three implosions in eleven days. The foundation dissolved, its DEX partner turned enemy, and $150 million in grant commitments evaporated into “market conditions.” The blockchain still runs, but no one’s home. Kadena didn’t explode; it deflated. Slowly, publicly, and entirely on-chain. (Read more)
Rekt Audit Broker
The big city sleeps, but the code never does. Neither do the crooks.
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Deep Dives
Beyond Audits: Securing Composable Protocols (5 min read)
Audits catch the bugs, not the blast radius. In 2025, most DeFi failures didn’t start in isolation - they spread like digital contagion across bridges, oracles, and governance modules chained together by “composability.” Spearbit’s latest piece dissects how safe contracts turn lethal when mixed, outlining why dependency mapping, behavioral modeling, and assumption inventories matter more than another audit badge.
Is the Move Language Secure? The Typus Permission-Validation Vulnerability (12 min read)
Typus Finance learned the hard way that “shared objects” in Move can mean “shared with the enemy.” A missing assert! in a permission check let anyone rewrite oracle prices, turning $1 tokens into $60,000 jackpots and draining $3.4 million across manipulated swaps and cross-chain bridges. SlowMist traced the funds through a maze of Tornado withdrawals and Curve mixers, but the real story lies deeper: even Move’s built-in safety rails can’t save you from sloppy validation.
AI Threats and Automation in Web3 Security (3 min read)
AI didn’t just enter Web3 - it invaded it. Generative models now write phishing lures, spin up fake frontends, and probe contract logic faster than human analysts can blink. AI-driven threats jumped over 1,000% this year, fueling $600M in phishing losses and turning autonomous agents into new attack surfaces.
Prompt injection to RCE in AI agents (20 min read)
AI agents with the ability to run system commands are a high-stakes attack surface: a single crafted prompt can turn an apparently “safe” utility into a remote-code-execution vector through argument injection.
Analysing ClickFix: 3 Reasons Why Copy/Paste Attacks Are Driving Security Breaches (9 min read)
ClickFix is phishing without the click - just copy, paste, and pray. These browser-based lures trick users into copying malicious commands from what looks like a CAPTCHA or “fix this error” prompt, then running them locally. Push Security’s report shows how the technique bypasses everything from spam filters to proxies, exploiting human trust instead of file downloads.
The Wave of Fake AI Content and How Cryptographic Proof Can Fight Back
We are drowning in pixels that lie.
The internet has always had its fair share of bullshit - but now, thanks to generative AI, it’s at industrial scale. Fake videos. Fake quotes. Fake lawsuits. Fake people. We scroll past deepfakes with blue checkmarks, repost screenshots with fabricated headlines, and train new models on data we can’t even verify is real.
This isn’t noise anymore. It’s infrastructure.
And the worst part? Our current defenses are about as useful as a spam filter in a phishing tournament.
Traditional trust signals - usernames, watermarks, likes, reposts, timestamps - are laughably easy to spoof. Anyone with a GPU and an imagination can spin up a synthetic identity, produce infinite "expert takes,” and pollute the feed faster than a newsroom can fact-check.
You can’t fight machine-speed misinformation with human-speed moderation.
But we don’t need more moderators. We need better metadata.
Enter content credentials. Think of them as digital receipts for media. Not just what something says - but how it was made, by whom, and what’s changed since it left their hands. A piece of content that can carry its own provenance like a passport, not a guessing game.
Here’s the difference it makes in plain terms:
When you see a viral clip of a politician saying something unhinged, you won’t need to “wait for the fact-checkers.” You can inspect the file yourself - cryptographic signature, timestamp, source. Was it made by a legitimate news agency? Was it altered after the fact? Is the creator who they claim to be?
No trust fall. No middleman. Just verifiable truth.
This isn’t just a win for consumers drowning in deepfake soup. It’s a lifeline for creators, too. Because right now, AI doesn’t just mimic style - it plagiarizes value. Artists, journalists, and researchers are watching synthetic content cannibalize their audience, their SEO, their careers.
With real content credentials, they can claim authorship. They can attach licensing terms. They can embed payment details. And they can finally get paid for the value they bring to the information economy - instead of watching LLMs rinse and recycle their work into the next viral hallucination.
And yes, AI itself benefits too. Because models trained on fake content will only get dumber over time - regurgitating garbage-in with even more garbage-out. If we don’t label the real from the fake, we’re not building artificial intelligence. We’re building synthetic stupidity.
So, what does the fix look like?
Cryptographic content credentials. Embedded at the point of creation. Tamper-evident. Verifiable. Portable. Monetizable.
That’s the standard we need.
And that’s the standard cheqd is building.
Not a watermark. Not a disclaimer. Not a bandaid.
cheqd anchors content credentials to decentralized identifiers and trust registries, using blockchain to store metadata that can’t be faked, forged, or quietly deleted. When your content moves, its origin moves with it.
You get receipts. You get rights. You get paid.
And the internet gets a shot at truth again.
In a world of infinite content, trust is finite.
Cryptographic proof is how we protect it.
*Sponsored article
Other Security Stories
Cold Wallet, Hot Mess: $3M in XRP Vanishes. A U.S. trader mistook their Ellipal wallet for cold storage, giving attackers a direct line to bridge and wash $3 million in XRP through Huione-linked OTC desks.
Europol Nukes SIMCARTEL, the Factory of 49 Million Fake Identities. A Europol-led raid took down a SIM-farm empire that sold disposable numbers to criminals building fake accounts across crypto exchanges, banks, and social platforms. The operation spanned 14 countries, seizing 1,200 SIM boxes and hundreds of thousands of cards powering one of the world’s largest fraud networks.
Centralized Exchanges, Not Mixers, Are Laundering Crypto at Scale. While regulators chase Tornado Cash headlines, the real laundering happens on the big-name, fully licensed exchanges everyone uses. A 2025 Chainalysis report found most illicit crypto ends up on these fiat gateways weak KYC, lazy compliance, and permissive jurisdictions turn “regulated” platforms into money-washing machines.
Russian Hackers Turn CAPTCHAs into Malware Launchers. Russia’s ColdRiver group has weaponized fake “I’m not a robot” checks, using ClickFix-style pages to trick victims into running new malware strains - NOROBOT, YESROBOT, and MAYBEROBOT.
North Korea Expands $6B Crypto Crime Network Through Russia, Hong Kong, and Cambodia. A joint report by the U.S., EU, Japan, and South Korea says Pyongyang’s hackers have industrialized crypto theft and laundering, routing billions through brokers and shell firms tied to sanctioned regions.
Security Events
CyberCon 2025
November 3-5, 2025 | Fairmont, British Columbia, Canada
Public-safety meets cyber-security: senior law enforcement, investigators and tech-forensics converge on crypto-fraud, darknet-analysis and cybercrime enforcement.
2025 Conference on International Cyber Security
November 4-5, 2025 | The Hague, Netherlands
Europe-facing forum on cyber diplomacy, state-craft, conflict security and inter-governmental cyber standards.
Crypto Safety Conference 2025
November 6-7, 2025 | Vienna, Austria
Focused on asset protection, mismanagement defence, de-pegs and infrastructural risk in crypto systems.
New York Cybersecurity Summit
November 18, 2025 | Sheraton New York Times Square, New York, USA
CISO-level event bridging infrastructure, identity, threat intelligence and fintech risk.
CyberThreat 2025
December 3-4, 2025 | London, UK
Two-day intensive event for security practitioners covering both offensive and defensive disciplines in enterprise cyber.
Rekt Flashback
One year ago, Andy Ayrey’s whimsical AI experiment went from philosophy to finance when Truth Terminal - a fine-tuned Llama 3.1 bot - shitposted its way into birthing the $GOAT token and a $300 million market cap. What started as an exploration of autonomy turned into a memetic contagion as degens flooded its Solana wallet with millions in airdrops, mistaking absurdity for alpha. But behind the illusion of independence sat a single human holding the keys, proving that even crypto’s first AI prophet couldn’t escape its creator’s control.
Memes and Videos
North Korea’s Most Wanted Hackers
What happens when a dictatorship industrializes hacking? Inside the Lazarus Group - where loyalty is coerced, talent is weaponized, and the line between crime and state policy no longer exists.
Source: Cipher
Source: alancarroII
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