Digital Parasites
Digital parasites aren’t smashing in, they’re clocking in - DPRK on your payroll, China in your routers, malware that plays dead and studies your mouse. The threat isn’t at the perimeter anymore, it’s on your org chart.
Legitimacy on Demand
Credibility for sale. Scrutiny sold separately. Pay-to-play removes the friction. No pitch required. No editor to convince. According to recent findings, 62% of crypto press releases come from high-risk or scam projects. When credibility is for sale, who can afford honesty?
Step Finance - Rekt
Audited contracts, bug bounties, and security reviews. None of it mattered when an executive's inbox at Step Finance became the attack vector. $27.3 million in SOL unstaked and gone. The smart contracts worked flawlessly. The humans didn't.
Frankenclaw
The lobster formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw, has over 156k GitHub stars. Hundreds left credentials and shell access wide open on the internet, plus a $16 million scam token and infostealers adapting. More hyping than warning. If this is an IQ test, many are failing.
Trove of BS
Pokémon cards and CS2 skins were supposed to be the product. Turns out, the investors were. Trove Markets raised $11.5 million for a Hyperliquid DEX, flipped chains before launch, sold partner tokens, kept $9.4 million “to keep building,” and spun excuses while wallets kept dumping.
Saga - Rekt
Forged IBC messages, $7 million minted from thin air. Saga’s bridge swallowed the fiction whole. Cosmos Labs traced it to Ethermint's codebase, they're now reaching out to other affected Cosmos EVM chains with short-term fixes.
Makina - Rekt
Flash loan goes in, pools get manipulated, permissionless oracle trusts the lie, $4.13 million walks out. Makina's code worked exactly as designed. MEV bots front-ran the attacker and kept most of the stolen funds.
Zero To Lend
Over ten months ago, $371K in LBTC left ZeroLend's Base market and never came back. Neither did an explanation. The team blamed "high utilization." GitHub went quiet. Users still can't withdraw. But hey - the deposit button still works.
Yo Protocol's Slippage Bomb
A vault operator on YO Protocol fat-fingered a $3.84 million swap with broken slippage params. $112K came out the other side - a $3.71 million loss. The team quietly backstopped it and waited 2 days to mention it publicly.
Truebit - Rekt
First major hack of 2026, as TrueBit was drained for $26.2 million through an overflow in unverified bytecode. The same attacker hit Sparkle weeks prior. Old code keeps bleeding - the archives have clearly become a shopping list.
TMXTribe - Rekt
$1.4 million lost on TMXTribe due to a logic bug. The team wallets deployed contracts during the exploit, never paused, and continue deploying days later. Meanwhile, complete radio silence from the team. Logic bug or choreographed exit?
Aave's Winter of Discontent
Fresh off its SEC victory, Aave turned on itself. A rushed, Christmas-week vote over brand control and swap fees exposed deep fractures - so severe the proposal’s own author disavowed it. Phase 1 collapsed. Phase 2 puts ownership and alignment back on the line.