Cybersecurity Awareness Month is thankfully over.
An already bumper month, which saw a PHP vulnerability threaten an estimated 70% of websites and Ledger devices drained for $90 million via spyware implants, ended with a bang as Binance suffered the biggest hack (or theft of any kind) in history.
The National Cybersecurity Alliance set this year’s theme as “Don’t Make It Easy for Them.” However, many have taken the stream of serious security breaches in the past month, both within crypto and elsewhere, as a sign of the dire state of cybersecurity in the age of AI-assisted hacking.
Read more: Linux earns ‘worst bug in the history of the internet’ status
Multiple crypto hacks per day
Blockchain security firm Peckshield tallied 56 “major hacks” across the crypto sector during Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
Read more: LIVE: Binance resumes withdrawals leading to $6B outflows | Protos
The vast majority of the month’s losses were from the monster $6.3 billion hack of Binance, of which around $3 billion was frozen on-chain. The FBI has officially attributed the attack to the North Korea-affiliated TraderTraitor, but the DPRK has denied any involvement.
In its latest update, Binance detailed the “sophisticated, multi-stage campaign” which led to the attack, beginning in June when an employee downloaded a malicious version of the package manager Homebrew.
Then, in September, another engineer was “instructed to download an ‘assignment’ containing a malicious code repository” during a staged job interview. The hackers were able to extend their reach during October before executing the attack on the 29th.
The other large-scale loss this month saw Ledger users who bought spyware-implanted devices via reseller CryptoBilis, lose a combined $90 million worth of assets.
Protos covered plenty of other incidents, including MetaMask unstaking $1.4B in ETH after a security scare, CoinDCX trying to sweep a $16 million hack under the rug, Keystone’s decision to destroy 19,000 units of inventory due to a compromised key, and data leaks which hit Coinbase and Bithumb users.
Many other incidents resulted in smaller losses which, as one security researcher pointed out, “get no post mortem and no tweet from the team, the money is just gone.”
As hacks piled up (the year has already seen double the number of crypto hacks in 2025), on October 8, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake urged the blockchain industry to go “bunker mode” in the face of AI threats.
The advice wasn’t particularly well received, though, with Vitalik Buterin warning users not to “scramble” to move funds, but recognising that quantum-vulnerable and AI-vulnerable cryptography should be taken seriously.
Read more: Initiate ‘bunker mode’ to protect crypto from AI, says Justin Drake
Not just crypto
Outside the crypto bubble, a PHP vulnerability threatened an estimated 70% of the web, with some governments shutting off their sites as a precaution. Spilling over into the real world, supermarket fridges in France were hacked and set to high temperatures causing spoilage estimated to be in the tens of millions of euros.
So far, November is off to a flying start, too. And all signs point to security incidents increasing in frequency going forward.
A bug in Linux has been dubbed “worst bug in the history of the internet,” someone is hacking supermarket fridges again, this time across Europe and, on the crypto front, Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin lost almost $50 million yesterday.
To top it off, blockchain sleuth ZachXBT has traced around $130 million of stolen funds from what he believes to be a “large financial institution in Western Europe” but, as yet, nobody has admitted to being the victim.
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