Published On Aug 14, 2025
Updated On Aug 14, 2025
Web3 Security 2025: AI Tools and Best Practices
In just six months of 2025, 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 2025.
Let’s get started.
The Evolving Threat Landscape in Web3
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 the adoption of new technologies.
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.
- Access-control failures are the top cause of Web3 losses, making up nearly 59% of total value lost, driven by compromised signers, leaked private keys, and misconfigured multisig setups.
- Smart contract vulnerabilities account for ~$263 million, showing that while audits have reduced risks, they have not fully eliminated them.
- Wallet compromises and phishing attacks have combined losses exceeding $2.1 billion in 2025, fueled by industrial-scale phishing-as-a-service kits draining wallets at record speed.
- Cross-chain bridge exploits remain one of the most destructive attack types, responsible for over $2.8 billion stolen historically, with recent incidents exploiting validator manipulation and proof verification bypasses.
Three Shifts Defining 2025’s Threat Profile
- Human & Process Weaknesses Are the New Prime Targets
- In past cycles, attackers chased exploitable code.
- Today, poor operational security, from mismanaged key storage to lax access policies, is the top cause of catastrophic loss.
- End Users Are on the Front Lines
- Wallet compromises and phishing now make up a massive share of stolen funds.
- This is partly due to the growing value held in personal wallets and partly because phishing kits have industrialised into scalable, subscription-based services on the dark web.
- Cross-Chain Infrastructure Remains a High-Value Weak Point
- Bridges, even those with advanced cryptographic designs, remain disproportionately targeted because they are single points of high-value settlement.
2025 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.
Major Hack Vectors in 2025 and What Real Incidents Reveal
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.
Phishing & UI Exploits: Uniswap Liquidity Provider Airdrop Scam
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:
- The malicious token linked users to a fake domain, uniswaplp[.]com, which mimicked the legitimate Uniswap interface.
- Victims were prompted to “claim” rewards, unknowingly granting token approval access to the attacker.
- Using these approvals, the attacker drained liquidity positions (represented as NFTs) directly from victim wallets.
What this means for security:
- Users and protocols must verify all interaction surfaces, not just contract code.
- Implement explicit token allowlists and permission-granularity checks at the wallet level.
- Enforce transaction previews on hardware wallets to expose malicious approvals before they are signed.
Governance Attacks: Compound’s Flash-Loan Exploit
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:
- A group of large COMP holders later referred to as the “Golden Boys,” proposed transferring 499,000 COMP tokens from the Compound treasury to their own protocol, goldCOMP.
- Low voter turnout and concentrated voting power enabled the proposal to pass despite community concerns.
- The governance system allowed the transfer to be executed once approved, with no delay for review or reversal.
What this means for security:
- Token-weighted voting without quorum safeguards can be exploited through coordinated large holders.
- Mandatory execution delays give the community a chance to intervene before treasury changes take effect.
- Minimum holding periods or delegation lock-ups help reduce opportunistic proposal passing.
- Governance monitoring tools should track unusual proposal patterns, delegate shifts, and treasury-related votes in real time.
Wallet & Key Compromises: Gnosis Safe Deepfake Attack
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:
- Malicious extensions injected a cloned Gnosis Safe interface into signer browsers, showing convincing but false transaction requests.
- Simultaneously, AI voice deepfakes of known team members called signers, urging immediate approval for what appeared to be urgent governance transactions.
- Signers approved the malicious transactions, transferring assets directly to attacker-controlled wallets.
What this means for security:
- Multisig approvals must be done on hardware devices with transaction hash verification.
- MPC wallets reduce reliance on any single keyholder.
- Signing devices should be physically and digitally isolated from general internet use.
- Teams must be trained to pause and verify through out-of-band channels before acting on urgent requests.
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 2025 requires:
- Immutable design for core logic wherever possible.
- Operational hardening of validator nodes, governance systems, and upgrade pipelines.
- Human-factor security that addresses social engineering, urgency scams, and real-time deception.
- Proactive monitoring that detects anomalies before they can be exploited.
Building and Running Secure Protocols in 2025
The biggest difference between protocols that survive in 2025 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.
Architectural Resilience and Upgrade Safety
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 2025 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:
- Lock down core functions like treasury transfers, governance execution, and bridge settlement with immutable logic, unless a change is necessary.
- Use modular contracts so one exploit doesn’t compromise the whole protocol.
- Restrict upgradeability, require multi-party approvals, and roll changes out in stages with monitoring in place.
- Keep upgrade processes transparent; attackers often act in the small window between an upgrade and when monitoring tools detect abnormal behaviour.
Helpful tools:
- Slither, MythX, Foundry for static analysis during development.
- Echidna for fuzz testing for rare edge cases.
- Certora Prover for formal verification of critical logic.
- Tenderly for simulating transactions pre-deployment and monitoring them post-upgrade.
Validator, Key, and Infrastructure Security
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 in 2025, not through smart contract hacks, but through phishing, infrastructure intrusion, and poor isolation.
How to reduce risk:
- Store operational keys in HSMs (AWS CloudHSM) or MPC wallets (Fireblocks, Safe{MPC}, Qredo) and rotate them regularly.
- Adopt Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) with solutions like SSV.Network or Obol to split signing authority and remove single points of failure.
- Separate validator infrastructure from public-facing systems, and use intrusion detection to flag anomalies early.
- Track validator performance and key usage in real time to catch abnormal patterns before they’re exploited.
Helpful tools:
- Forta Network, Eigenlayer Watchtowers for continuous validator and AVS monitoring.
- Chainalysis KYT to detect suspicious address interactions.
Governance as a Security Boundary
In 2025, 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:
- Use snapshot-based voting via Snapshot.org to lock in token balances when a proposal is created, preventing flash-loan voting attacks.
- Enforce execution timelocks with OpenZeppelin TimelockController so harmful proposals can be stopped before going live.
- Separate the power to propose changes from the authority to execute them.
- Monitor governance patterns for unusual participation spikes or sudden coordination among previously inactive addresses.
Helpful tools:
- Tally Governance Alerts, DAOwatch to monitor proposal activity and voting patterns.
- OpenZeppelin Defender to manage governance contract permissions securely.
Human-Factor and Social Engineering Defence
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 are being used in coordinated campaigns against multisig operators and treasury teams.
How to strengthen the human layer:
- Require hardware wallet signing with transaction hash verification.
- Use MPC wallets for high-value actions so no single person can execute them alone.
- Keep signing devices isolated from general web use, ideally air-gapped or on dedicated machines.
- Have out-of-band verification channels for urgent approvals.
- Run phishing simulations (via KnowBe4 or similar) so teams can recognise high-pressure, high-deception scenarios.
Monitoring, Detection, and Response
Many of 2025’s 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:
- Deploy on-chain monitoring agents to watch for unusual transactions, role changes, or large fund movements.
- Use multi-channel alerts like Slack, PagerDuty, and Telegram to ensure incidents are seen immediately.
- Maintain a response playbook so everyone knows their role in the first 30 minutes of an incident.
- Partner with security firms like PeckShiel and SlowMist, ahead of time, for emergency support.
Helpful tools:
- Forta Network, Tenderly for contract monitoring and anomaly detection.
- PeckShield, CertiK, and SlowMist for external incident triage and analysis.
Every major breach in 2025, 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 2025, the next leap forward is from integrating AI-driven security capabilities. Let’s see how it will shape the future of blockchain security.
AI-Driven Trends in 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.
AI-Powered On-Chain Anomaly Detection
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:
- Forta AI Modules now incorporate deep learning-based anomaly scoring for validator operations and bridge settlements, significantly reducing false positives compared to the 2024 versions.
- Tenderly AI Watchers analyse historical and live transaction data to assign dynamic “health scores” to deployed contracts, flagging degradation before it becomes critical.
- Chainalysis Reactor AI offers near real-time clustering of suspicious wallet activity across chains, enabling faster identification of coordinated attack campaigns.
AI-Assisted Smart Contract Auditing
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:
- OpenZeppelin’s Audit can now compare deployed contract bytecode against documented architecture after upgrades, identifying logic mismatches that may have slipped through governance review.
AI-Driven Incident Response Automation
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:
- Defender Autoresponder by OpenZeppelin now integrates with AI risk scoring to automatically pause high-risk contracts or enforce additional approvals on sensitive actions.
- Eigenlayer AI Watchtowers can initiate validator rotation or temporarily suspend signing operations when suspicious activity is detected.
- Forta x Safe Integration allows AI alerts to dynamically increase multisig signer requirements, raising the barrier for unauthorised fund movements.
Understanding Adversarial Use of AI
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:
- Automated vulnerability scanning of publicly deployed smart contracts to find exploitable logic faster.
- Synthetic media generation, realistic voice and video deepfakes are used to impersonate known team members in high-pressure social engineering scenarios.
- Localised, multilingual phishing campaigns crafted with AI to increase credibility across different communities and geographies.
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:
- Strong architecture and operational safeguards
- Continuous monitoring and governance hardening
- AI-powered detection, auditing, and incident response
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.
Security as a Continuous Discipline
The events of 2025 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:
- They treat security-by-design as a core design principle from the first line of code.
- They maintain tight operational discipline around keys, validators, upgrades, and governance.
- They protect the human layer with clear processes, verification requirements, and isolation for sensitive actions.
- They integrate AI-driven monitoring and response to match the speed of modern exploits.
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.
Astha Baheti
Growth Lead
