Each month, MetaMask Security Director Luker reports on the latest crypto attacks and emerging risks that you need to know about. Dive into the details below, but first…
Featured STEM pioneer: Willis Ware, digital privacy and cybersecurity trailblazer
Willis Ware blazed trails for digital privacy and cyber security. He “co-developed the IAS machine that laid down the blueprint of the modern day computer in the late 20th century,” and founded The American Federation of Information Processing Societies.
MetaMask delegation architecture proven across CoinFello, Clawnch, and Revoke.cash integrations
This month, we've seen MetaMask’s delegation architecture proven out across 3 unique use cases. CoinFello built a self-custodial AI agent for DeFi using ERC-7710 delegations from our Smart Accounts Kit, so the signing key stays in the device's secure enclave instead of living in the agent's runtime, meaning a prompt injection or compromised dependency can't reach it.
Clawnch pushed the model further, wiring agents that earn real trading fees to spend that income inside contract-enforced caveats rather than trusting the agent's own judgment; if an action falls outside the delegation's bounds, the transaction reverts at the contract level, not after the fact. This security-first model is why Agent Wallet is built around rules, not blind delegation. The agent can act, but it acts inside the user's boundaries.
For more assurance to put your agentic-curious mind at ease, check out this take from our head of developer relations Francesco Andreoli, who debunks the misconception that automation and self-custody are mutually exclusive.
Beyond agents, Revoke.cash used MetaMask’s Smart Accounts Kit to launch Auto-Revoking, cleaning up risky token approvals on a schedule using an ERC-7715 permission scoped to do exactly that action and nothing else, all without ever holding a user's keys. Taken together, these three integrations point to a principle we keep coming back to: authority should be scoped, time-bounded, and enforced onchain, not promised by an application or an agent. That's the difference between "trust me" and "the contract won't let me do otherwise," and it's the design pattern we'll keep building toward as more of our partners bring automation into self-custodial wallets.
Consensys security engineer Herman Junge shares takeaways from Harvard Kennedy School cybersecurity course
Security professional Herman Junge at Consensys shares takeaways from Harvard Kennedy School's executive course on cybersecurity policy, touching on AI as a force-multiplier for both attackers and defenders, the brittleness of the infrastructure modern digital life relies on, and how cyber conflict operates in a gray zone below the threshold of war. He closes with the observation that security ultimately succeeds or fails on communication: technical risk must be made legible to the people who hold budget and decision-making power, or it effectively doesn't exist.
Trezor shipping provider breach exposes 12,000 customers' names and addresses across 7 countries
Trezor recently disclosed that one of its shipping providers suffered a data breach exposing order data for customers who received shipments in the 90 days before August 8, 2026, affecting the US, UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, and Portugal. Names, shipping addresses, phone numbers, and emails were exposed for nearly 12,000 customers, though wallets, funds, and firmware were untouched, and Trezor's strict 90-day data retention policy limited how much was ever at risk.
MetaMask flagged this to our users the same day. Even though crypto holdings weren't compromised, a breach like this hands attackers the exact kind of real-world data (names, addresses, and confirmation that someone owns a hardware wallet) that fuels convincing follow-up phishing and, in the worst cases, physical targeting. Be extra skeptical of unexpected emails or texts claiming to be from a wallet provider. This follows two previous data breaches suffered by Trezor users in 2022 and 2024.
Crypto wallet users targeted by phishing emails
Trezor users aren’t the only ones who need to be on high alert. There’s a new wave of malicious emails impersonating crypto wallets, even going so far as using fake-but-convincing blue checkmarks. Remember to always check the sender address and keep in mind that MetaMask will never (ever) ask for your secret recovery phrase or ask you to verify anything to retain access.
Be especially cautious with communications that push a sense of urgency. We encourage you to reach out to support.metamask.io or @MetaMaskSupport if you ever have any doubts. For more information, check out our support article: “Is this email really from MetaMask?”
Coldcard firmware flaw exploited for $116 million after going undetected for five years
This is a rough one for the "cold storage is the safe choice" crowd. Starting July 30, 2026, an attacker exploited a five-year-old firmware flaw in Coinkite's Coldcard wallet, tracing back to a March 2021 build error that silently disabled the device's hardware random number generator and fell back to a weak software substitute, cutting effective key strength as low as 40 bits and making seeds brute-forceable with no physical access to the device required. Across four waves, attackers drained roughly 1,816 BTC (about $116 million) from more than 5,200 addresses, making it the third-largest crypto hack of 2026 and the largest hardware wallet exploit on record. Updating firmware doesn't fix wallets that already generated a seed under the flawed code; anyone in that window needs to treat their existing seed as burned and migrate to a freshly generated one.
What makes this one worth sitting with is less the dollar figure and more what it says about "don't trust, verify" as a security model. Coldcard's firmware was open source, and users could have reproduced the build and caught the bug at any point in five years, but as CoinDesk found, effectively nobody looked closely enough, and one developer reportedly flagged the flawed randomness code over a year before it was exploited, only to be told it would've surfaced by now if it were real.
Ethereum Foundation advances post-quantum roadmap as quantum risk to crypto grows more concrete
Quantum risk in crypto has been getting more concrete lately, and three stories this month show the shift from theory to preparation. First, Quantus Network founder Christopher Smith warned that the first real quantum attack on crypto probably won't look like a dramatic Satoshi-wallet heist. Instead, it could surface as a wave of ordinary-looking wallet breaches with no forensic trail at all, since a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive private keys straight from public keys already exposed onchain, leaving no compromised device or exchange to point to.
At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation is putting real resources behind getting ahead of that risk: researcher Justin Drake announced that after an eight-year research effort, the Foundation is moving Ethereum's L1 away from the Poseidon hash function in favor of battle-tested alternatives like SHA and BLAKE, calling it a milestone for the network's broader post-quantum roadmap.
That roadmap is starting to reach the parts of Ethereum that hold real money. A draft EIP submitted by the Ethereum Foundation’s Kevaundray Wedderburn proposes rebuilding the validator deposit contract, the gateway that roughly $104 billion in staked ETH passes through, since the existing contract hardcodes the dimensions of today's BLS signatures and has no room for the larger keys post-quantum schemes require. The new design would accept variable-length keys up to 8,192 bytes and tag each deposit with a "scheme identifier," so BLS keeps working today while leaving space for a not-yet-chosen post-quantum standard to be added later, plus an irreversible retirement mode to eventually phase BLS out for good.
TheDAO.fund gathers security experts to discuss operational security gaps and the future of Ethereum security funding
TheDAO.fund brought together a cohort of Ethereum security experts for a talk on operational security (OpSec) including Hudson Jameson, Isaac Patka, Joseph “Dobs” Dobson, Joe “Audit Wizard” Van Loon, Vladimir “Officer’s Notes” Sobolev, Anuoluwapo “Anu” Adeleke, Aruda Usman, Roman and host Griff Green.
The conversation covered why OpSec is often where crypto teams are most exposed, why audit recommendations don’t always turn into action, and how complacency, human factors, and weak follow-through can lead to major losses.
Griff also shared more on TheDAO.fund’s next phase: a more proactive, initiative-focused approach to funding Ethereum security. Spoiler: Requests for proposals are coming
Bybit files civil lawsuit against North Korea and Lazarus Group over $1.5 billion hack
Speaking of record-breaking losses, Bybit is taking on the nation of North Korea and the Lazarus Group in a civil lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia for the world’s largest crypto theft to date of roughly $1.5 billion in ETH and stETH.Bybit also secured a preliminary injunction freezing stolen assets held by a group of unidentified "John Doe" defendants, barring them from moving or selling the funds while litigation proceeds.
The move runs alongside ongoing US criminal investigations, reflecting Bybit's broader push, in coordination with law enforcement and other exchanges, to recover funds and set a precedent for holding state-sponsored actors accountable. North Korea has stolen an estimated $6.75 billion in crypto since 2016, according to a Chainalysis report, and much of it is believed to fund the DPRK weapons program.
MetaMask’s August 2026 Crypto Security Report covered the $116 million Coldcard firmware exploit draining 1,816 BTC after going undetected for five years, Bybit's civil lawsuit against North Korea and the Lazarus Group over the $1.5 billion hack, and the Ethereum Foundation advancing its post-quantum roadmap. Browse previous editions of the MetaMask Crypto Security Report for more emerging risks, threats, and tips for how you can stay safe across the ecosystem.
