Authentic investigative journalism and unfiltered creative commentary

Monday, August 4, 2025

They weren’t meant to be used. They weren’t supposed to matter anymore. But in the ruins of outdated logic, attackers found gold.

Welcome to the world of dead code — functions that were deprecated, abandoned, or simply forgotten during a protocol’s evolution. In theory, they’re obsolete. In practice, they’re live attack surfaces hiding in plain sight. These functions, left behind in smart contracts after upgrades, refactors, or mergers, continue to operate with all their original privileges—except now, no one’s watching them.

In complex on-chain systems, the assumption that “no one calls this anymore” is a dangerous one.

The blockchain doesn’t care whether a function is marked deprecated in your repo. If it’s still callable in deployed bytecode, it’s still very real.

That ancient method tucked away in a proxy’s previous implementation? It might still be able to write to storage, drain balances, or assign roles—if the attacker knows how to get to it. And they do.

The risk isn’t just that old code remains. It’s that protocols treat it like it’s gone.

Auditors skip over it. Developers stop thinking about it. The community assumes it’s been retired.

But attackers — especially those who’ve spent time reading dusty Solidity docs and scraping GitHub commit histories— understand that legacy code is legacy power.

When protocols upgrade, they often introduce multiple logic pathways: proxies, delegatecalls, fallback handlers, external orchestration layers.

In the chaos of transition, it’s easy to overlook a function that shouldn’t be exposed anymore — but still is. Some of these functions don’t even look dangerous at first glance.

But with the right sequence of calls, they can be weaponized.

Many projects inherit more than they need — pulling in libraries or templates that include generalized logic for use cases the protocol doesn’t even support.

Those unused branches often go untested, unaudited, and unmonitored. But if they’re still deployed, they’re fair game.

And if they touch anything critical? They’re a live grenade waiting for someone to pull the pin.

Upgrades don’t just need to work — they need to be thorough. That means revoking access to obsolete logic, validating all execution paths in new environments, and verifying that nothing old can override something new.

Every overlooked modifier, every dusty fallback, every legacy call left unlocked is another invitation to be drained.

In smart contracts, dead code isn’t dead. It’s dormant.

And if it has access to memory, storage, or privilege — it’s still alive in all the ways that matter.

Millions lost. Same story every time.
A Telegram intro. A rushed audit. A protocol drained.

Security shouldn’t be a favor.

We built something different.
A broker.
A matchmaker.

Today we're launching the Rekt Audit Broker — in partnership with Stake Capital.

One form. Multiple responses.

Auditors don’t know who they’re bidding against.
You don’t need to know 3 founders to get a quote.
Everyone shows up with their best, or not at all.

Every match vetted. Every proposal tracked.

Are you ready for the front page?
Or would you rather fix it before we write it?

You’re one form away from not getting rekt.

•Wrench attacks drive crypto investors to centralized custodians [Read more]

•Arizona woman sentenced to 8.5 years for running North Korean laptop farm [Read more]

•Bubblemaps flags ‘Rugproof’ launchpad over alleged rug pull risks [Read more]

•This Fake Bitcoin ATM Scheme Has Wasted 4,000 Hours of Scammers' Time [Read more]

•CoinDCX employee arrested in connection with $44M crypto hack: Report [Read more]

•Identifying common vulnerabilities in zkVMs
zkVMs enforce strict determinism by design, removing entire categories of mistakes from the developer’s hands. But when your circuit breaks, you can't blame the VM—it's your own logic bleeding out.

•Why Access Control Failures Are Still The #1 Attack Vector?
Access control isn’t just another checkbox on a security list. I’s the single point of failure that gave hackers godmode access to entire protocols with a single misplaced modifier.

•DePIN Security Best Practices
Smart contracts are only one slice of the risk pie. Real devices, firmware, backend orchestration, and governance each open their own attack surface — and they don’t always play nice together.

•Exploiting zero days in abandoned hardware
End-of-life doesn’t mean end-of-exploit. As long as the hardware boots and firmware sits unpatched, it’s still a viable foothold for attackers who know what they’re looking for.

•Following the Bitcoin Trail: The IntelBroker Takedown
Investigators mapped every wallet, every deposit, every gambling site—until the digital mask of “IntelBroker” peeled back to reveal a former UK cybercrime trainee.

When you control the randomness, you control the game. Eddie Tipton hardwired his own lottery wins from the inside, using stealth malware, burner phones, and fake trusts to rake in millions. But one unclaimed ticket—and a sloppy disguise—brought it all down.

We provide an anonymous platform for whistleblowers and DeFi detectives to present their information to the community. All authors remain anonymous. 
We are all rekt.