Tuesday, December 2, 2025

They didn’t require brilliance - just patience. When protocols misfire, exploits become maintenance work for whoever arrives first.

THE HUMAN BAIT SHOP: A Field Guide to Modern Phishing (Web2 + Web3 Edition (12 min read)
Phishing in 2025 is behavioral engineering. Attackers mimic authority, timing, UI patterns, and wallet flows with AI-generated precision, turning routine moments into compromise. DNS hijacks, fake claim pages, blind-sign payloads, and reverse-proxy logins blend seamlessly into everyday workflows - and humans, not systems, become the attack surface.

Explained: The Aerodrome Finance Hack (November 2025) (3 min read)
Base’s largest DEX didn’t get breached on-chain - it got impersonated at the domain layer. A rogue insider at NameSilo altered Aerodrome’s DNS records for its .box and .finance domains, silently rerouting users to a pixel-perfect phishing clone that funneled them into signing “harmless” transactions followed by a barrage of unlimited approvals. Over $1M vanished in under an hour as wallets obediently handed over ETH, WETH, USDC, and anything with an infinite allowance.

Intent Bridges: Where Value Leaks and Assumptions Fail (12 min read)
Intent-based bridging sounds elegant - users sign what outcome they want, solvers compete to deliver it, and a settlement layer stitches it all together - but the moment these systems meet production, assumptions collapse fast. Cross-domain replay, nonce races, partial-fill rounding theft, simulation leakage, solver self-dealing, and registry abuse all turn a clean EIP-712 flow into a minefield of replayable digests, manipulable paths, and solvable MEV.

Why Web2 Security Is Critical in Web3 Systems — Coinbase Security Series (10 min read)
Most Web3 exploits don’t come from smart contracts - they come from the Web2 layer wrapped around them. Modern dApps stitch authentication, admin tools, gameplay logic, metadata indexing, and user state into a backend that rarely matches the chain’s truth. Split-call workflows drift out of sync, multi-source ownership caches rot in place, and business rules enforced only in Web2 crumble the moment an attacker calls the contract directly.

Staying Private in Crypto & Web3: Simple, Practical Tips That Actually Work (7 min read)
Crypto sold the dream of anonymity, but 2025 delivered the opposite: permanent public ledgers, mandatory KYC funnels, and analytics firms linking wallets to identities at industrial scale. Privacy isn’t dead - it just requires intention. This guide breaks down the habits that actually preserve anonymity today: rotating addresses, isolating identities, avoiding KYC choke points, using Monero and CoinJoin correctly, shielding Ethereum activity with privacy L2s.

Fake Chrome Wallet “Safery” Steals Seed Phrases Using Covert Sui Transactions. A polished, five-star-stuffed Chrome extension posing as an Ethereum wallet climbed into top search results, harvested user seed phrases, and exfiltrated them as micro-encoded Sui transfers.

80,000 Exposed JSON Pastes Leak Credentials Across Banks, Governments, and Critical Infrastructure. A five-year trove of unprotected “Recent Links” from JSONFormatter and CodeBeautify spilled Active Directory logins, private keys, AWS credentials, CI/CD secrets, and sensitive configs into the open turning routine code-formatting into one of the largest accidental credential leaks of the year.

Home Invasion Thief Steals $11M in Crypto After San Francisco DNS-Style Delivery Ruse. A fake delivery worker restrained a resident and forced access to wallets before laundering the haul on-chain, echoing a surge in physical-crypto coercion cases where wrench attacks meet stablecoin freeze races, AI-accelerated laundering, and expanding 2025 enforcement rails.

X’s New Device-Exposure Policy Raises Targeting Risks for Crypto Users. By publicly revealing users’ countries and access methods, X hands attackers a shortcut to profiling Android and web users - the platforms most vulnerable to wallet-drainers and malware - prompting security experts to urge Apple-only setups, strict app hygiene, and hardware-wallet custody as targeted phishing and device-level compromises accelerate.

Report Warns DPRK Operatives May Be Embedded in 20% of Crypto Firms. Security analysts say up to 40% of crypto job applicants are North Korean fronts using stolen identities and malware-assisted “interview helpers”.

Director of Security, Gauntlet, New York, United States (Remote)

Senior Cyber Security Engineer, Bitpanda, Vienna, Austria

Security Engineer, Asymmetric Research, Remote

Security Analyst, Figment, London, United Kingdom

Blockchain Security Expert, CertiK, United States (Remote)

Security Engineer (Web3), The Institute of Free Technology, Remote (Worldwide)

One year ago, Parallel Finance’s stripes finally washed off in the rain. What began as a VC-blessed Polkadot darling - Stanford pedigree, Sequoia funding, and enough audits to wallpaper a boardroom - unraveled into a paper tiger held together by batch calls, secret minting, and disappearing promises. As the chain was abandoned, a self-proclaimed white hat seized the keys, DOT bled across chains, and governance theater played out on an empty stage. The community was left staring at stranded assets while the founders rehearsed their next pivot off-chain. In a jungle full of predators, Parallel proved that some tigers don’t earn their stripes - they just paint them on.

Online poker had its Madoff, and his name was Russ Hamilton. Ultimate Bet’s “God Mode” turned online poker into a rigged magic show, draining players for tens of millions. This is the story of the greatest grift ever hidden behind a pair of sunglasses and a champion’s smile.

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