Monday, January 12, 2026

After $4B in losses in 2025, the first week of January opens with a familiar pattern: broken governance, off-chain trust failures, and money laundering that still moves faster than accountability.

This week:

• Aave turns regulatory freedom into a governance collapse as forced votes, brand wars, and revenue fights nuke market confidence
• TMXTribe lets $1.4M drain for 36 hours straight without ever hitting pause, then disappears without a word
• Bridges, wallets, cloud giants, and QR codes all reminding us that most “web3 security” still dies off-chain

When governance becomes theater and security becomes optional, protocols don’t get hacked. They self-destruct with witnesses.

• Aave turns regulatory victory into a $500M governance bloodbath. After four years under investigation, the SEC closed its probe with no enforcement action. Aave was finally free. Five days later, Aave Labs force-pushed a brand ownership proposal to vote without the author’s consent, during Christmas, while the DAO was still debating what the proposal even meant. Markets didn’t wait for the result. AAVE dumped 25%, whales exited at eight-figure losses, and a “decentralized” protocol learned that when founders control the frontend, brand, and revenue, governance tokens are just rent receipts. (Read more)

• TMXTribe bleeds $1.4M while the team watches for 36 hours and never hits pause. An unverified, unaudited GMX fork let attackers loop mint, stake, swap, and drain until the treasury was hollow. The team deployed upgrades, sent bounty offers, and stayed “active” on-chain while the exploit ran nonstop. Funds bridged through Across, disappeared into Tornado Cash, and the protocol stayed silent. No postmortem. No apology. No emergency stop. (Read more)

‍Web3 Security in 2026: Lessons From 2025, Projections Ahead (14 min read)
2025 proved that losses don’t scale with bugs, they scale with access. Most failures didn’t live in smart contracts, they lived in signing keys, governance paths, upgrades, and third-party trust. In 2026, security stops being about finding bugs and starts being about controlling blast radius, validating system behavior continuously, and catching failure before it compounds.

Year in Review: The Biggest DeFi Hacks of 2025 (4 min read)
Only six hacks crossed $50M in 2025, but one of them rewrote the scale of damage. Bybit alone dropped $1.4B through a supply-chain hit on its signing infrastructure, turning trusted approvals into a full exchange drain. The rest split cleanly: Cetus and Balancer blew up on bad math and broken invariants, while Nobitex, Phemex, and UPCX collapsed from compromised keys and poisoned updates. Fewer incidents, same lesson: when access fails, losses don’t scale linearly, they detonate.

Zero Trust Identity and Access for Web3 Protocols (8 min read)
Zero trust isn’t corporate cosplay, it’s breach prevention. Most “hacks” still start with identity: a leaked key, a lazy admin wallet, a signer nobody owns. If your protocol runs on long-lived keys and browser extensions, you’re not decentralized, you’re fragile.

Rust Security & Auditing Guide by Sherlock: 2026 (22 min read)
Rust killed most memory bugs, but it didn’t kill bad security. In 2026 the real failures come from unsafe assumptions, sloppy boundaries, and binaries that aren’t what anyone audited. Deserialization lies, async paths deadlock, and release pipelines quietly swap the code under your feet.

Explained: The Truebit Hack (3 min read)
A five-year-old, closed-source minting contract quietly became a $26M ATM. A pricing bug pushed TRU’s mint cost near zero, letting the attacker mint massive amounts for dust and sell them back to the bonding curve for real ETH. No exploit chain, no flash loans, just forgotten code with real money still inside.

ZachXBT flags a cross-chain wallet drainer in the wild. Hundreds of EVM wallets are being skimmed for small amounts, adding up to ~$107K across 20 networks, with the attacker favoring Ethereum and BNB Chain.

South Korea moves to make hacks hurt the exchanges, not just users. Regulators want fines up to 10% of stolen assets, turning breaches into multi-million dollar liabilities instead of a $456K slap on the wrist.

Ledger customers exposed again. A payments partner breach leaked names and contact details, handing phishers a fresh targeting list and reopening the same off-chain attack surface that has already led to ransom, extortion, and wrench attacks.

North Korea turns QR codes into login stealers. Kimsuky is using “quishing” to push targets onto unsecured phones, bypass MFA, hijack cloud accounts, and turn compromised mailboxes into new phishing launchpads.

Google Cloud became the phishing sender. Attackers abused its email automation to ship “legitimate” Google notifications that funneled victims through trusted Google and AWS links before landing on fake Microsoft login pages and draining M365 credentials.

go-panikint: Trail of Bits released go-panikint, a modified Go compiler that turns silent integer overflows into explicit panics.

AgentLISA PaymentShield: A full-stack security suite for agentic payment infrastructure, aiming to protect autonomous payment layers with a dedicated risk stack.

PhishIntentionLLM: PhishIntentionLLM is a multi-agent phishing detection framework that analyzes URLs, landing pages, and behavioral signals to identify phishing infrastructure and attacker intent.

Pocket Universe Transaction Simulator: Pocket Universe is a browser-based Web3 security extension that simulates transactions on a forked chain before signing, allowing users to preview real execution effects and detect phishing, honeypots, malicious approvals, bait contracts, and asset-draining logic in advance.

MalCodeAI Autonomous Security Engine: MalCodeAI is an AI-driven vulnerability detection and remediation framework that uses code reasoning to autonomously discover exploitable patterns.

Two years ago, Socket reminded everyone what infinite approvals really mean. A rushed upgrade added a broken route, attackers injected a transfer call, and $3.3M was pulled straight from user wallets. No deposits, no interaction, just old permissions waiting to be abused. Bridges don’t need your funds to steal from you, only your approval and one bad deploy.

Napster didn’t kill music, it broke the illusion of control. One kid, a P2P network, and suddenly the entire industry found out its business model was just DRM with better marketing. They won in court, lost in culture, and trained a generation to expect everything instantly and for free.

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We are all rekt.