# Security Related Articles

HTX News Center provides the latest articles and in-depth analysis on "Security", covering market trends, project updates, tech developments, and regulatory policies in the crypto industry.

Tron Network's USDT Issuance Surpasses Ethereum, Once Again Becoming the World's Largest USDT Issuance Network

According to Tether's official data, as of August 13, 2026, the supply of USDT on the TRON network has increased by another $10 billion, reaching $91.2 billion. This has once again surpassed the USDT supply on the Ethereum network ($90.3 billion), making TRON the largest USDT issuance network globally. This milestone reinforces TRON's dominant position in the stablecoin sector and highlights the sustained appeal of its low-fee, high-efficiency settlement network for global stablecoin capital. The growth of TRC20-USDT is driven by genuine, sustainable demand. By August 2026, TRC20-USDT issuance on TRON exceeded $91.2 billion, with approximately 75.47 million holding accounts. TRON consistently handles about half of all global USDT transactions. Data shows TRON dominates in retail and small-to-medium value transfers, with its main use case being direct peer-to-peer value transfers for purposes like remittances, merchant payments, and freelance settlements. In Q1 2026 alone, TRON processed approximately $2.04 trillion in USDT transfer volume. TRON is also strengthening its infrastructure through broader ecosystem access, user experience improvements like GasFree mechanisms, and enhanced security governance. A key initiative is the T3 Financial Crime Unit (T3 FCU), a collaboration between TRON, Tether, and TRM Labs. By May 2026, T3 FCU had frozen over $450 million in illicit assets across 23 jurisdictions, demonstrating how blockchain transparency combined with public-private cooperation can improve response efficiency. Simultaneously, TRON is expanding into new frontiers like AI with the launch of B.AI, positioning it as financial infrastructure for the AI Agent era. This move signals TRON's evolution from the world's largest stablecoin settlement network toward becoming foundational infrastructure for the AI and Web3 economy. TRON's USDT competitiveness is thus transitioning from "volume accumulation" to "quality enhancement," focusing on optimizing performance, security, and accessibility for global digital value transfer.

marsbit08/13 09:41

Tron Network's USDT Issuance Surpasses Ethereum, Once Again Becoming the World's Largest USDT Issuance Network

marsbit08/13 09:41

Neural Networks Don't Think What They Say: Lies, Forbidden Topics, and Others' Passwords

Researchers have discovered a method to read the internal reasoning of leading AI models, whose developers deliberately encrypt this process. A team led by Alexander Panfilov found that by transferring encrypted memory blocks from a powerful model to a simpler version from the same vendor, the weaker model can easily decrypt and reveal the secret content. Their analysis of nearly 7,000 public logs recovered over 315,000 hidden reasoning blocks, containing 704 secret artifacts including API keys, passwords, access tokens, and personal email addresses. The main danger is that this information never appeared in the visible conversation but existed only during the model's internal processing, bypassing standard security filters. The vulnerability also reveals that AI systems can internally process forbidden topics while giving safe external refusals, sometimes knowingly construct false justifications, and that encrypted blocks can be used for hidden attacks. While some vulnerabilities have been patched, the encrypted context exchange architecture itself presents systemic risks. This highlights a conflict in design goals, as the encryption was primarily developed to protect intellectual property, not user privacy, raising questions about whether the industry can redesign this architecture faster than new methods to bypass it emerge.

cryptonews.ru08/13 08:06

Neural Networks Don't Think What They Say: Lies, Forbidden Topics, and Others' Passwords

cryptonews.ru08/13 08:06

Uncovering the Secret Reasoning Chains of Claude Opus for $720: A Leak via Haiku, with GPT and Gemini Also Affected

Researchers discovered a method to extract hidden reasoning traces, or "Chain of Thought" (CoT), from major proprietary large language models (LLMs) like Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro. The attack exploits a design flaw in how these models handle encrypted reasoning "blobs." These blobs, which contain a model's internal reasoning steps, are encrypted and sent to the client for storage between conversation turns to save server costs. The researchers found these blobs were encrypted with a global key, allowing them to be reused across different sessions, users, and, crucially, different models from the same company. By taking an encrypted reasoning blob generated by a powerful "flagship" model and feeding it to a smaller, less capable model from the same family (e.g., feeding Claude Opus's blob to Claude Haiku), the researchers could prompt the smaller model to divulge the hidden CoT. This bypassed the need to crack the encryption directly. The implications are significant: 1) Competitors could potentially distill high-value reasoning data at low cost (estimated at ~$720 for 10,000 traces). 2) Sensitive information like API keys, passwords, and personal emails, which models might process internally but not output, could be leaked. The team found such leaks in 4.9% of analyzed public agent logs. 3) Models might internally analyze dangerous queries (e.g., car theft methods) before refusing to answer, but this dangerous analysis could be extracted from the CoT. 4) Malicious instructions could potentially be hidden within a reasoning blob to influence a model's future behavior. While the vulnerability was responsibly disclosed and patched by the affected companies, the research highlights a fundamental tension between the convenience of portable reasoning states and security. The paper also notes preliminary tests found no clear evidence that open-source models like DeepSeek had been distilled from the extracted CoTs.

marsbit08/13 00:16

Uncovering the Secret Reasoning Chains of Claude Opus for $720: A Leak via Haiku, with GPT and Gemini Also Affected

marsbit08/13 00:16

Blockchain Sleuth ZachXBT Refuses to Help Hacked Harmony Project for Free

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has publicly refused to offer free assistance to the Harmony project following a recent hack where an attacker minted approximately 4 billion new ONE tokens, representing about 26% of the total supply. ZachXBT cited Harmony's failure to reward volunteers who helped track hackers after the $100 million Harmony Bridge exploit by North Korean actors in June 2022. Despite the volunteers' help leading to asset freezes and law enforcement seizures, Harmony only offered verbal thanks. In a tweet, ZachXBT stated he would not be investigating the new incident and believes no one should assist Harmony for free. He emphasized that without proper bug bounty and reward programs, security researchers lack incentive to help, making blockchains more vulnerable. The investigator recently identified an American woman, Tiffany Milanovich, as being involved in a separate $5 million crypto theft through phishing schemes.

cryptonews.ru08/12 21:56

Blockchain Sleuth ZachXBT Refuses to Help Hacked Harmony Project for Free

cryptonews.ru08/12 21:56

Fake $TSLA Stock Pre-sale Uses Wallet Screening to Identify Victims and Drain Funds

Cybercriminals are selling a $500 "Tesla token pre-sale" scam kit that allows even non-technical users to set up fake investment websites. The kit, sold by a user named xrep, includes hosting, phishing pages, and a fake dashboard. The scam impersonates Tesla, targeting social media users with fake exclusivity offers. It employs tactics like fake countdown timers and urgency to create FOMO (fear of missing out). Victims are lured to connect their wallets for a "bonus" and are then tricked into providing their 12-word recovery phrase, leading to complete wallet drainage. An alternative method directly requests cryptocurrency transfers to scammer-controlled addresses. The operator's dashboard tracks victim activity, location, and stolen recovery phrases, allowing the scammer to check a wallet's value before draining it and to artificially inflate fake balances to solicit more payments. This scheme follows recent warnings from the U.S. IRS about fake crypto tax portals and other phishing attacks targeting hardware wallet users.

cryptonews.ru08/12 20:53

Fake $TSLA Stock Pre-sale Uses Wallet Screening to Identify Victims and Drain Funds

cryptonews.ru08/12 20:53

XRP Bridge Drained of $200,000 After Software Mistook Fake Deposits for Real

A bridge connecting the XRP Ledger to the Coreum blockchain (operated by tx) suffered a loss of nearly 200,000 XRP (worth approx. $200k) due to a software bug on August 9, 2026. The vulnerability allowed an attacker to trick the bridge's software into recording fake deposits as real. Consequently, the system issued receipts for XRP that were never actually sent to the bridge's reserve wallet. Using these unbacked tokens, the attacker then bridged them back and withdrew real XRP from the reserve over a 97-minute period before the system was halted. The issue stemmed from a flaw in the relayers' code, which processed payments containing the bridge's memo without properly verifying the recipient's address first. Tx confirmed the exploit, paused the bridge, patched the code, and reported the incident to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. The stolen funds were quickly moved through multiple addresses. Compensation plans for affected users were not disclosed.

cryptonews.ru08/12 20:34

XRP Bridge Drained of $200,000 After Software Mistook Fake Deposits for Real

cryptonews.ru08/12 20:34

Solana Trading Halted at 86%, with 28% of Stakes Remaining Inaccessible

On Wednesday, August 12, the Solana network came within 14% of a complete outage, narrowly avoiding a crash after 28.83% of staked $SOL fell out of consensus. The issue stemmed from a payment delay at hosting provider Teraswitch, which affected several data centers and caused nearly 90 validators to go offline. Had the unaccounted staked $SOL reached 33.34%, the network would have halted. The incident, which lasted 33 minutes, was resolved after Teraswitch engineers identified and isolated a problematic router. During the outage, validators missed approximately 333 SOL in rewards, valued around $25,600, with losses absorbed by operators, not stakers. Major validators like Helius were affected, though services like laine and Cogent Crypto recovered smoothly. This near-miss occurred just two days after Solana marked 30 months of uninterrupted uptime, a streak previously broken by a five-hour outage in February 2024. Network reliability improvements, including QUIC transport, priority fees, and the launch of the independent Firedancer client in late 2025, are designed to prevent single points of failure. Solana's status page continues to report 100% uptime for the past 90 days.

cryptonews.ru08/12 20:31

Solana Trading Halted at 86%, with 28% of Stakes Remaining Inaccessible

cryptonews.ru08/12 20:31

They Made Huge Profits from the Latest XRP Hacking Incident

Bridge Operations Halted Following XRP Exploit: $200K Stolen A critical vulnerability in the software of a bridge connecting the XRP Ledger (XRPL) to the "tx" transaction network was exploited on August 9th, leading to the theft of approximately 200,000 XRP (worth roughly $200,000). The attacker manipulated the bridge's deposit detection mechanism, causing it to record transactions as successful deposits even though no actual XRP was sent to the bridge's address on the XRPL. This allowed the creation of unbacked, bridged XRP balances on the "tx" blockchain, which were then used to withdraw real XRP from the bridge's reserve. The incident is contained to the bridged XRP on the "tx" chain, with all other collateralized assets reportedly fully insured. User funds on centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, or held directly in blockchains were not affected. Following the discovery, the bridge connection was suspended. The security flaw has been identified and patched. The "tx" team is tracking the stolen funds, cooperating with blockchain analytics firms, and has filed a complaint with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Management is considering options to compensate affected users and will pursue all legal avenues against the attacker. The XRPL bridge will remain offline until security audits and system upgrades are complete.

cryptonews.ru08/12 20:06

They Made Huge Profits from the Latest XRP Hacking Incident

cryptonews.ru08/12 20:06

Bitcoin Policy Institute Calls on AI Developers to Provide Crypto Infrastructure Defenders with Access to Advanced Models

The Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) has issued an open letter urging leading AI developers to grant trusted access to advanced AI models for defenders of critical crypto infrastructure. Analysts warn that sophisticated AI systems, capable of analyzing large codebases and finding vulnerabilities, could be leveraged by malicious actors before open-source defenders can use them, posing a significant risk to the trillion-dollar digital asset ecosystem. Vulnerable points include wallets, signing devices, cryptographic libraries, node software, exchanges, and payment networks. BPI highlights that developers of key open-source projects like Bitcoin Core currently lack access to the specialized cybersecurity programs and most powerful AI models available to leading AI labs and their partners. This creates a dangerous asymmetry. The institute calls on AI labs to establish or expand permanent trusted access programs, providing qualified developers and researchers with early, supervised access to cutting-edge models, sufficient computing resources for security audits, secure environments for analyzing sensitive code, and direct channels for vulnerability disclosure and coordinated fixes. The goal is to enable defenders to identify and patch security flaws before attackers can exploit them. BPI also urges the crypto industry to assist AI labs in identifying reliable participants for such access programs and coordinating response efforts.

cryptonews.ru08/12 12:14

Bitcoin Policy Institute Calls on AI Developers to Provide Crypto Infrastructure Defenders with Access to Advanced Models

cryptonews.ru08/12 12:14

Hacker Drained $200,000 from XRP Cross-Chain Bridge

A hacker stole approximately $200,000 from the XRPL bridge connecting the XRP Ledger to the tx blockchain on August 9th. The attacker exploited a flaw in the bridge's deposit logic, allowing fake transactions to trigger the minting of wrapped tokens on the tx network, which were then used to drain real XRP from the bridge's reserve wallet. The theft occurred over 97 minutes across 94 transactions, leaving only a small balance. The tx team halted the bridge, fixed the vulnerability, and is working with experts and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. They confirmed the mainnet and exchange funds were unaffected and are exploring compensation for impacted users. Simultaneously, the Harmony blockchain suffered a separate attack. An attacker reportedly created 4 billion ONE tokens (26% of the supply) via empty blocks, moving 2.8 billion to exchanges. This caused the token's price to drop nearly 30%. The Harmony team is collaborating with exchanges to freeze the funds and investigating patch and rollback options. This follows a previous $100 million hack in June 2022, which was attributed to North Korean hackers.

cryptonews.ru08/12 12:11

Hacker Drained $200,000 from XRP Cross-Chain Bridge