Privacy coins and protocol flaws complicate crypto security response

[madmax]

Following January’s largest phishing theft, attackers rapidly converted stolen funds into Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, triggering a surge in XMR’s price and renewing concerns about illicit fund obfuscation. Analysts say the incident highlights the limits of hardware security when user-level defenses fail.

Beyond phishing, smart contract vulnerabilities continued to impact DeFi. Truebit lost $26.6 million to an overflow flaw, while Swapnet and other protocols suffered multi-million-dollar breaches. A separate attack on Solana-based Step Finance drained treasury wallets of nearly 262,000 SOL. As February begins, security experts warn that human error remains crypto’s most expensive vulnerability.