1.5 billion security incidents drive industry security upgrade, Cactus Custody adds encryption custody defense system

On February 21, 2025, the crypto industry suffered a landmark security incident - the leading exchange Bybit lost $1.5 billion in assets due to a social engineering attack. Hackers forged executive instructions to induce multiple key managers to authorize abnormal transfers. After the incident, Bybit responded quickly and demonstrated a fully graded security incident handling solution. But looking back on the entire incident, we must admit that hacker attacks have entered a new stage of precision and scenario-based. How to rebuild reputation by strengthening security measures and transparency will be a long-term challenge facing the entire crypto industry.

Industry Collaborative Defense: From Crisis to Consensus

Within 24 hours of the incident, many world-renowned crypto financial service platforms such as Coinbase, Binance, and Matrixport responded actively. Through cooperation and information sharing, they promptly blocked the hacker addresses related to the Bybit incident, reduced the circulation of stolen assets and the possibility of money laundering, and helped the prosecution successfully block the transfer of US$180 million in stolen money.

The analysis report of the technical team of CertiK, a well-known crypto security agency, revealed deeper problems - 83% of the platform cold wallet management systems have key rotation vulnerabilities, and 67% of the transaction log audits have tampering risks. The report emphasized: "When attackers begin to exploit organizational behavior vulnerabilities, simple technical protection is no longer sufficient, and a verifiable operational control system must be introduced."

The chief technology officer of SynFutures, a security expert in the DeFi field, said that the Bybit incident showed the potential loopholes in the cross-border cooperation between DeFi and CeFi platforms. How to better unify security standards in the future has become an important issue that the platform needs to consider.

As hacker methods continue to escalate, the threshold for industry security protection is also constantly rising. Fortunately, this incident not only demonstrated the textbook crisis and public relations handling of the Bybit team, but also showed that the centripetal force of the crypto industry is returning in the crisis - Bybit has received support from many well-known exchanges and whales including Bitget, MEXC, and OKX.

Ecosystem-level defense from single-point breakthrough to global resilience

In this security storm, Cactus Custody, the industry-leading compliant digital asset custody platform, provided a unique solution. It stated on its official X: "This attack combines the triple means of 'senior social engineering + 0day vulnerability + customized code', and risks are often hidden in 'hidden corners'."

Cactus Custody proposes a "four-level protection model":

Transaction initiation layer: Dedicated physical equipment isolates the operating environment, and all instructions require biometric binding.

Business verification layer: Dynamically load the risk control rule library according to business type, and DeFi transactions will additionally trigger smart contract sandbox detection.

Core signature layer: Strict whitelist management and minimized contract call principles, unauthorized operations are automatically frozen.

Capital flow layer: Set dailyransaction dynamic limits and prevent asset penetration risks through on-chain liquidity monitoring.

Cactus Custody builds a secure ecological network through strategic alliances, making each link a cost amplifier for attackers. For example, it builds a MEV protection system with Blocknative to reduce the risk of front-running transactions; cooperates with CKB and Meson Finance to introduce digital custody solutions for ccBTC to ensure 1:1 Bitcoin reserves; and cooperates with Vistra to launch a digital currency trust to meet the asset inheritance needs of family offices.

A new paradigm for security: verifiable trust

It seems that the security of the crypto asset custody industry has become one of the most pressing issues at present. In the future, how to balance security, convenience and compliance has become a difficult problem that all crypto asset platforms and custody service providers must work together to face. However, judging from the positive energy initiatives of multi-party support and collaboration in the Bybit incident, in the face of such security incidents, both crypto institutions and important participants are willing to use their accumulated surpluses to the greatest extent to form a common moat to resist risks. What everyone is guarding is not the hard-to-reach private keys, but the industry's confidence in the digital future.

When the Bybit incident exposed the lethality of human vulnerabilities, Cactus proposed: "Use machine trust to balance human weaknesses and make compliance standards a real-time defense component." As an industry-leading encrypted asset management platform, Cactus Custody now has custody of more than US$4 billion and has served more than 300 institutional clients. The "certification-technology-insurance" triple line of defense it has built (SOC audit system, FIPS 140-3 level HSM hardware, and a US$50 million exclusive insurance policy) has become an industry reference template.

What crypto asset management platforms provide is not higher walls, but making every security decision measurable, verifiable, and traceable. In this endless security race, perhaps it is the practice of Cactus Custody that implants compliance genes and crisis awareness into the marrow of technology that can truly protect the value flow in the Web3 era.