$4.67 million lost from Secret Network’s bridge connection to Axelar Network after a forked Secret-side IBC contract minted unbacked tokens from thin air. 2 missing validation checks let an attacker forge deposits with a fake Cosmos chain. Drain went undetected for 7 days.
One deprecated contract, one flawed escape hatch circuit, and a verifier that should have been retired years earlier. Aztec’s legacy rollup contract lost roughly $2.198 million after a ZK proof passed a broken root-binding check.
$2.28 million drained from Aztec Connect on June 14th, a deprecated ZK-rollup built by Aztec Labs, across two consecutive days. The ZK proof and settlement layer processed different transaction sets, attackers exploited the gap to mint unbacked balances and drain real funds.
Seven keys on one laptop handed an attacker $36.4 million from Humanity Protocol across Ethereum and BSC. Rare for its kind, the owner of the compromised device was publicly named. The code wasn't broken. The key management was, and nobody's been held accountable for either.
5 billion SYS minted from a malformed SPV proof that slipped past Syscoin’s bridge relay parser. The team published the receipts, coordinated a whitehat recovery, and the funds came back. No public audit record for the relay path that failed.
One key held everything. TesseraDAO lost $2.49 million - minted from nothing, dumped, and gone through Tornado Cash. No multisig, no real audit, not even an acknowledgment that they were exploited. Just hollow men, straw governance, and a Telegram full of bots.
$5.4 million gone from Gravity Bridge after an attacker minted worthless tokens on Osmosis, poisoned the token registry with a fabricated denom string, and walked out with real assets. The attacker didn't break the code. They just found where it stopped asking questions.
A 2021 DxSale locker, an unprotected admin key, $7.3 million gone. Decurity flagged the risk in 2023 for $500. Two compromised contracts holding $15.5 million remains untouched, for now.
One poisoned VS Code extension silently auto-updated to 2.2 million developers, and TeamPCP walked out with 3,800 GitHub internal repositories in eleven minutes, the culmination of eight months spent climbing the developer supply chain one trusted tool at a time.
$3.98 million drained from 88 Gnosis Safes across three chains on New Market Trading. A third-party Safe module trusted caller-supplied data over msg.sender. One missing require check. Anyone who read the source code could drain every wallet.
A malicious node is believed to have exploited THORChain’s GG20 TSS signing stack to leak vault key material, reconstructed the private key offline, and drained $10.7 million across multiple chains. The network halted itself. The attacker was already gone.
They told you to connect everything. You wrote the explainer. They sent you to a conference. On May 11, someone else did the checking - 170 packages, 518 million downloads, OpenAI's signing certificates. The unaudited stack is the attack surface. Be paranoid by default.