If you're working on something real — let's talk.
© 2026 Lampros Tech. All Rights Reserved.
Published On Aug 14, 2025
Updated On Feb 04, 2026
In just the last six months, Web3 has already lost over $3.1 billion to hacks, overtaking the total losses of all of 2024.
Attackers are no longer relying on opportunistic bugs or copy-paste exploits. They’re engineering multi-stage attacks that blend on-chain vulnerabilities with off-chain manipulation, targeting not just DeFi protocols but cross-chain bridges, governance systems, and even wallet infrastructure.
The stakes have never been higher. Every upgrade, every integration, and every governance proposal now expands the attack surface.
And with Layer 2s, Layer 3s, restaking protocols, and AI agents entering the stack, security risks are compounding in ways most teams aren’t prepared for.
In this blog, we’ll look at how today’s most common Web3 hacks work and the practices that actually prevent them in 2026.
Let’s get started.
The security conversation in Web3 is no longer about “if” a protocol will be attacked; it’s about how prepared it is when the inevitable happens.
Over the past few years, attack sophistication has grown in lockstep with adoption.
What began as isolated, opportunistic smart contract bugs has morphed into multi-vector operations that blend on-chain vulnerabilities, social engineering, governance manipulation, and cross-chain exploits.
By mid-2025, the scale of damage will have already exceeded anything the industry has seen before. The single largest incident, the Bybit heist, accounted for $1.5 billion alone, representing almost 70% of all service-level losses this year.
The composition of these losses reveals a lot about where attackers are focusing.
2026 has turned security from a technical checklist into an ecosystem-wide survival strategy.
These numbers aren’t just statistics; they’re signposts pointing to where attackers are most active and where defences still fall short.
The patterns behind recent breaches show clear priorities for threat actors, and understanding them is key to building security that lasts.
The security breaches of 2025 have made one thing clear: the most damaging attacks are not caused by a single point of failure.
Instead, they are carefully planned operations that combine vulnerabilities in code, gaps in operational processes, and human missteps.
The common thread is speed; attackers act within hours, sometimes minutes, of identifying a weakness.
Below, we break down the four attack vectors causing the greatest damage this year, pairing them with real 2025 incidents to understand how they happened and what could have prevented them.
Smart contracts remain the backbone of Web3 infrastructure.
Even when the underlying protocol code is secure, attackers can bypass it entirely by targeting the user interface, wallet permissions, and trust boundaries.
In mid-2022, Uniswap liquidity providers fell victim to a $4.7 million phishing campaign. The AMM’s smart contracts were never breached. The problem began with a malicious ERC-20 token airdropped to over 73,000 addresses, impersonating an official UNI reward.
How it unfolded:
What this means for security:
Decentralised governance is designed to make protocols adaptable, but without safeguards, it can be exploited as a direct route to protocol treasuries.
In 2024, governance capture incidents have become more visible, especially in protocols with low active participation and concentrated token holdings.
In mid-2024, Compound lost ~$24 million worth of COMP tokens after a small coalition successfully passed a self-serving proposal.
How it unfolded:
What this means for security:
Wallet compromises have long been a risk for individuals, but in 2025, they’ve become a significant organisational threat.
Multisig wallets, DAO treasuries, and protocol funds are now targeted with advanced social engineering combined with technical deception.
In February 2025, the Bybit hack, attackers compromised Bybit’s Gnosis Safe multisig operators via a malicious frontend, resulting in a $40 million loss.
The exploit targeted the interface, not the Safe smart contracts themselves.
How it unfolded:
What this means for security:
Across all these incidents, a pattern is clear: the attacker’s first move is identifying the weakest point in a critical process, whether that’s a contract upgrade, validator set, governance mechanism, or signing process.
Effective defence in 2026 requires:
The biggest difference between protocols that survive in 2026 and those that don’t isn’t just better code, it’s that their teams treat security as a continuous, end-to-end discipline.
Attackers are no longer waiting for launch day bugs. They’re watching governance forums, monitoring validator sets, probing upgrade pipelines, and targeting team members.
That means the only way to stay ahead is to design with security from day one and maintain that posture every day after deployment.
Below is an integrated blueprint that combines security-by-design principles with the operational and governance safeguards needed to keep a protocol safe in an environment where threats evolve weekly.
The architecture defines the limits of what an attacker can do.
If high-value logic is changeable, or components are too tightly linked, a single weakness can cause a system-wide compromise.
Many incidents, from bridge drains to liquidity pool exploits, didn’t come from flawed original code, but from unsafe changes made later.
How to build and maintain resilience:
Helpful tools:
Code can be flawless, but if the keys that control it are compromised, the protocol is still at risk.
Validator nodes, bridge signers, and multisig operators have been prime targets, not through smart contract hacks, but through phishing, infrastructure intrusion, and poor isolation.
How to reduce risk:
Helpful tools:
In 2026, governance isn’t just a coordination tool; it’s a high-value target.
Several protocols have lost millions this year without a single line of code being exploited, simply because governance rules allowed malicious proposals to pass and execute instantly.
How to make governance resilient:
Helpful tools:
The most advanced code and infrastructure can’t help if a keyholder is tricked into approving a malicious transaction.
In 2025, deepfake calls, phishing-as-a-service kits, and cloned dApp interfaces were being used in coordinated campaigns against multisig operators and treasury teams.
How to strengthen the human layer:
Many largest exploits were visible on-chain as they happened, but the problem was that the right people didn’t see them in time.
Monitoring and response planning turn those minutes into a defence window instead of a post-mortem detail.
How to be ready:
Helpful tools:
Every major breach in, from Uniswap V3’s proxy upgrade exploit to validator key compromises, exploited a combination of technical, operational, and human weaknesses.
Treating security as a one-time audit leaves too many openings.
By combining strong architectural choices like tight operational discipline, hardened governance, human-factor defences, and real-time monitoring, protocols can reduce both the probability and the scale of successful attacks.
In 2026, the next leap forward is from integrating AI-driven security capabilities. Let’s see how it will shape the future of blockchain security.
Security-by-design and operational discipline form the foundation of a resilient protocol, but in 2025, they are not enough on their own.
Modern Web3 exploits unfold in minutes, often combining multiple vectors like smart contract flaws, governance manipulation, validator key compromise, and social engineering into a single operation.
This speed and complexity require a layer of intelligence that can detect, analyse, and respond faster than human teams.
AI has now moved from a support role to becoming an integral part of blockchain security infrastructure, embedded in monitoring, auditing, and incident response pipelines.
And while adversaries are also exploring AI-driven tactics, security teams that understand these capabilities can anticipate threats and deploy countermeasures in advance.
Rule-based monitoring is limited; it can only detect issues it’s explicitly told to look for.
In a landscape where attackers constantly innovate, security teams need systems that can recognise unfamiliar attack patterns as they emerge.
AI-powered anomaly detection tools are now training on years of blockchain transaction history, combined with real-time network activity, to learn what “normal” looks like for a given protocol or validator set.
This makes it possible to detect subtle deviations such as unusual bridge transaction flows or abnormal governance voting activity before they escalate into major losses.
Recent upgrades:
As DeFi protocols, cross-chain applications, and rollup infrastructures grow in complexity, manual audits alone can’t keep up with the speed of development and deployment.
Post-launch upgrades, especially through governance proposals, have introduced some of the year’s most costly vulnerabilities.
AI auditing assistants now work alongside human auditors to scan large contract bases, highlight high-risk code paths, and cross-reference live deployments with intended specifications.
This approach increases coverage, speeds up reviews, and helps detect vulnerabilities that may emerge after initial deployment.
Recent upgrades:
Even with rapid detection, many exploits drain funds in under 20 minutes. Reducing the time between detection and containment is now the difference between losing a fraction of assets and losing everything.
AI-powered incident response systems can trigger predefined containment actions when they detect anomalies with high confidence.
These measures may pause contracts, disable upgrade paths, or temporarily restrict sensitive functions, giving teams critical time to investigate and respond.
Recent upgrades:
The same capabilities that strengthen defences can also be adapted for attacks. Understanding these possibilities allows security teams to close vulnerabilities before they are exploited preemptively.
Observed tactics this year:
Security teams are deploying authenticity verification for media, code fingerprinting to detect altered smart contracts, and AI-powered filters to flag deceptive communications, turning the same technological advances into proactive defences.
AI is no longer a separate security toolset; it’s becoming part of the security infrastructure itself. Teams that combine:
With these, one can able to match the speed and sophistication of 2025’s exploits. Waiting until after an incident to integrate AI into the security stack means starting a race already a step behind.
The events have made one truth impossible to ignore: in Web3, security is never “done.”
The biggest losses this year weren’t caused by obscure, once-in-a-lifetime bugs; they were the result of predictable weaknesses in architecture, governance, operations, and human processes.
And in nearly every case, the warning signs were visible on-chain before the final attack was executed.
The protocols that are surviving in this environment share a few common traits:
This isn’t about creating a system that’s impossible to breach in an open, composable environment like Web3; that’s unrealistic.
It’s about building for resilience, so that a single failure doesn’t turn into a protocol-wide compromise, and so detection and containment happen before attackers can complete their plan.
As the attack surface expands with multi-chain deployments, Layer 2 and Layer 3 rollouts, and new economic primitives, the distinction between “launch security” and “ongoing security” is blurring.
For builders and operators, the choice is simple: integrate these practices into your foundation now, or face an environment where every upgrade, integration, or governance proposal could be the opening an attacker needs.
At Lampros Tech, we’re helping teams build future-ready blockchain infrastructure that aligns with the evolving Web3 security landscape, where resilience, scalability, and user trust are designed into every layer.
Growth Lead
FAQs
The most significant Web3 security threats include governance attacks using flash loans, smart contract upgrade vulnerabilities, phishing campaigns targeting wallet users, cross-chain bridge exploits, and insider operational risks. Attackers are also leveraging AI to identify and exploit weaknesses faster than traditional monitoring tools can detect them.
Governance attacks exploit voting systems in DAOs and DeFi protocols. Attackers may borrow governance tokens via flash loans to gain temporary majority control, pass malicious proposals, and drain funds before the community can respond. Strong safeguards like snapshot-based voting, execution delays, and anomaly detection can help mitigate this risk.
To prevent upgrade-related exploits, protocols should treat every post-deployment change as a fresh attack surface. This means enforcing immutable logic for non-governable core functions, requiring multi-party sign-off, using staged deployments with real-time monitoring, and conducting thorough audits on all upgrade scripts, not just initial code.
Cross-chain bridges handle large asset transfers across blockchains, making them high-value targets. They also rely on complex architectures involving multiple consensus and validation layers, increasing the risk of bugs, misconfigurations, or compromised validators. Security measures should include multi-signature validation, redundancy, continuous auditing, and real-time monitoring.
AI is enabling both attackers and defenders to move faster. On the defensive side, AI models can detect anomalies, flag suspicious governance activity, simulate attack vectors, and automate incident response. However, attackers are also using AI to scan for vulnerabilities, generate exploit code, and bypass traditional defences, making proactive AI integration essential for protocol survival.
