security

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced an investment in AI Agent security startup Runta, which aims to help businesses manage and constrain AI agents like "raising children." The specific investment amount has not been disclosed.Runta founder Guanlan Dai previously worked on the technical team at Cloudflare and was a founding engineer at API connection startup Kong. He stated that AI agents share similarities with growing children: they have the ability to perform tasks autonomously but also require boundaries, supervision, and permission management. Dai believes that just as parents provide home safety protection for children and limit their access to credit cards, businesses also need to restrict the important documents that AI agents can access, the range of operations they are allowed to perform, and the amount of disposable funds available at one time.Runta is developing a set of "AI Agent guardianship" infrastructure to help businesses manage AI agents' permissions, security risks, and behavioral boundaries, preventing autonomous AI systems from causing data leaks, erroneous operations, or financial losses during task execution. As businesses increasingly deploy AI agents with autonomous decision-making capabilities, establishing a trustworthy and secure agent management system is becoming a new infrastructure requirement. Runta aims to become the "parental control layer" of the AI Agent era, providing capabilities such as agent identity management, permission control, risk limitation, and operational supervision for businesses. Industry insiders believe that as AI agents evolve from simple assistants to autonomous entities capable of operating business systems, handling transactions, and executing complex tasks, the infrastructure market surrounding agent security, governance, and compliance may experience rapid growth.

Elon Musk stated that after completing the security vulnerability review, X will open source all code repositories without exception. In addition, X will invite third-party auditors to verify the actual operating system to confirm its consistency with the publicly available source code.

The governance company of Cardano, Intersect, stated on the X platform that EMURGO is unable to allocate the necessary resources to execute the Token2049 event due to its recent focus on handling the SecondFi security incident. After discussions among three parties, the responsibility for the event has officially been transferred to the Cardano Foundation.EMURGO submitted a transfer request to Intersect, which received agreement from all parties after discussions with the Cardano Foundation. Intersect stated that this decision was based on the urgency of the event timeline and the need to avoid delivery uncertainties. The Cardano Foundation has agreed to deliver the event within the approved scope, and both EMURGO and Intersect recognize its past execution capabilities. The delivery work for Token2049 has now officially been handed over, and the event is still scheduled to take place in October.Previously, in June, it was reported that SecondFi disclosed a security incident affecting approximately 16 million ADA (around 2.42 million USD at the time); however, SlowMist indicated that user losses from SecondFi could exceed 20 million USD.

The ENS DAO has initiated a proposal to establish a new Security Council based on the election results of EP 6.50, with a term of two years, ending on July 16, 2028.According to the proposal description, the new Security Council will inherit existing responsibilities and continue to be responsible for canceling malicious proposals within the ENS DAO, without the authority to initiate, modify, or actively promote governance proposals. The proposal will be configured by granting the corresponding permissions to the DAO's TimelockController.The proposal also indicates that after the two-year term, if the DAO does not pass a new proposal for an extension, any address may call the relevant function to revoke its cancellation proposal authority.

According to an announcement from Qubic's official X account (@Qubic), a security incident occurred in the Qubic GitHub organization on July 13, where a compromised account accessed the code repository and extracted sensitive information. The official team has intervened to address the situation.The official team recommends that the following users take immediate action: Network Guardians should immediately rotate their seeds; Web wallet users who unlocked their wallets between 03:00 and 10:00 UTC on that day should migrate to a new identity; if unsure of the last unlock time, migration is also advised; developers should pause pulling or deploying code from the Qubic code repository until the official audit is confirmed to be completed.The official team stated that complete details and subsequent updates will be released on the official Discord channel, reminding users not to trust information from unofficial channels, and warning that no one should request user seeds for any reason. A post-incident report will be published after the situation is resolved.

Dragonfly partner Haseeb responded on Twitter to OpenZeppelin co-founder Manuel Aráoz's previous pessimistic view on DeFi security, stating that with models like GLM 5.2, Fable, and GPT 5.6 now online and actively used by attackers, DeFi has not experienced the anticipated "hacker apocalypse."Chart data shows that based on current year-to-date figures and operating rates, the annualized amount stolen in DeFi by 2026 is approximately $1.89 billion, with a cumulative theft of about $986 million this year, which is lower than the levels of 2025 and still within historical ranges.Haseeb believes that the deeper change currently is that while the number of hacker attacks has increased, the scale of individual attacks has decreased more rapidly, with attackers increasingly targeting smaller protocols and abandoned projects, while larger protocols have completed more security enhancements, thus the overall safety of funds has not significantly worsened.

Japan's largest securities token issuance and management platform, Progmat, has completed its migration to the Avalanche blockchain, transferring all managed tokenized assets worth over 452 billion yen (approximately 2.7 billion USD) from a Corda 5-based permissioned chain to a dedicated Avalanche Layer 1. This migration was announced in February this year and was completed as scheduled, without affecting the normal operations of financial institutions.Progmat stated that the new architecture no longer relies on a single blockchain and can support future multi-chain expansion. All smart contracts have been migrated to the EVM environment, and while maintaining the original functionality, the speed of asset rights transfer processing has increased by 3 to 5 times, with the final confirmation time for transactions reduced to under 2 seconds. Progmat was initially incubated by Japan's largest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation (MUFG), and became an independent operation in 2023. It currently has the support of major Japanese financial institutions such as Mizuho Bank, Tokyo Stock Exchange, and SBI, holding a 53% market share in Japan's securities token market and accounting for 64.6% of the total issuance scale of securities tokens, covering most tokenized real estate and corporate bond projects.In addition, Progmat established a working group for the tokenization of Japanese government bonds and on-chain repurchase (Repo) in May this year, collaborating with asset management institutions, banks, and securities companies to research the tokenization of Japanese government bonds and explore application scenarios such as 24/7 trading and T+0 real-time settlement.

According to Bitcoin.com, Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad responded on X to U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren's criticism of the CLARITY Act, stating that the bill will not undermine national security but rather bring digital asset platforms under stronger regulation. Elizabeth Warren previously stated that the current draft of the CLARITY Act could provide opportunities to evade sanctions.Faryar Shirzad stated that the bill will require crypto platforms to comply with stricter national security standards and allow platforms to freeze suspicious transactions at the request of law enforcement.U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis previously stated that the CLARITY Act includes 16 illegal financial protection measures and warned that the bill may be the last major opportunity for Congress to pass comprehensive digital asset rules before 2030.

Founder of Strategy, Michael Saylor, stated that Bitcoin is a spontaneously evolved network system, where the influence of wallets is determined by the amount of satoshis held, the influence of nodes is determined by business activities, the influence of miners is determined by computing power, and capital, consensus, and network security together maintain a dynamic balance.

Injective's official account posted on the X platform, stating that recent media reports have covered news about "potential security risks involving the Injective npm package." This issue has been promptly identified and resolved. User funds have never been at risk and have not suffered any losses.The official statement indicated that its security monitoring system detected the issue immediately and quickly marked the affected package version as deprecated, while replacing it with a new version, thus blocking the risk before the malicious package could be downloaded.As a result, the download volume of the malicious package is zero, and it has not affected users; the security of user funds has also not been threatened. Injective's npm package is one of the most widely used SDKs in the cryptocurrency field, and the official team has now implemented optimization measures to ensure that such attack attempts cannot occur again.

According to PR Newswire, QIZ Security announced the completion of a $17 million seed round financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, Qino Cyber Capital, and others.The company positions itself as a management platform for crypto assets and post-quantum cryptography (PQC), providing continuous crypto asset discovery, risk modeling, and governance, helping large clients in finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure achieve "crypto agility" to address the risk of "Q-Day," when quantum computing capable of breaking existing encryption systems may emerge as early as 2029, and collaborates with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, IBM, and others to promote enterprise quantum security migration planning.

Gate recently released a detailed verification statement regarding the security item changes and fund loss incident reported by customer 9****6. After an internal review, the platform confirmed that the applicant submitted materials highly matching the customer's account, including Email, phone number, real-name information, transaction records, and Alipay screen recordings. The platform pointed out that the Alipay screen recording required access to the customer's Alipay account and successfully passed multiple identity verifications, indicating that the applicant not only possessed account information but also obtained the customer's external real-name information, Alipay account, and device permissions in advance.The platform emphasized that its security unbinding review implements a four-fold verification process of "multi-channel advance notification + system risk control preliminary screening + manual multi-layer review + time protection." After notifying the customer through dual channels, the application was processed only after waiting two days without objections, and a 24-hour withdrawal prohibition protection was imposed after modification. Upon investigation, there were no information leakage logs within the platform, and some sensitive identity information provided by the applicant was external information previously unknown to the platform.Regarding fund recovery, the platform has sorted out the flow of funds and collaborated with multiple departments to conduct on-chain analysis and asset tracking, currently coordinating with third parties like Tether to advance the freezing process, and will cooperate with judicial investigations in the future. The platform advises customers to conduct comprehensive security reinforcement on their devices and expresses regret that the customer did not contact the platform within the three-day notification period.

According to The Block, Cash App's parent company Block has agreed to pay $45 million to settle with regulatory agencies in nearly 50 states in the U.S. over allegations of misleading security promotions and insufficient anti-fraud measures. Regulators accused Block of marketing Cash App as having security protections comparable to traditional banks, but failing to establish a comprehensive fraud detection system and not providing an effective fraud reporting hotline, resulting in users suffering losses from scams.Additionally, regulators accused Block of continuing marketing activities despite being aware of the increase in scams and amplifying scam risks in promotional activities. Under the settlement agreement, Block must improve customer support services, provide 24-hour live customer service, and cease related promotions regarding Cash App's security. Block denies any wrongdoing, stating that the settlement involves previously disclosed legacy issues.

According to CoinDesk, the new version of the XRP Ledger server software v3.2.0 has been launched, aiming to reduce operational costs, enhance stability, and increase appeal to institutional users. Currently, about 43% of the approximately 833 active nodes are running the new version, while 51% are still using the old version v3.1.3. However, about 89% of the 35 validators in the default UNL have upgraded, reaching the required 80% threshold for activation.The security amendment fixCleanup3_2_0 associated with the software upgrade is still under independent voting, covering fixes and improvements for single-asset vaults, permissioned DEX, multi-purpose tokens, and lending protocols, with current support far below the software adoption rate. Ripple has voted in favor of this amendment, and validators that do not upgrade before the amendment is activated may face the risk of being cut off from the Ledger.

According to the report from the Cybersecurity Threat and Vulnerability Information Sharing Platform (NVDB) of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on July 8, recent monitoring has found serious security backdoor risks in the AI programming tool Claude Code developed by the American company Anthropic.The report pointed out that the affected versions of Claude Code are from 2.1.91 to 2.1.196. This tool has a built-in monitoring mechanism that can, without user consent, secretly transmit sensitive data such as users' location and identity identifiers to remote servers. The official recommendation is for relevant units and users to immediately conduct a comprehensive inspection, uninstall the affected versions of the terminal, or upgrade to the latest secure version that has removed the related backdoor code; at the same time, they should strengthen the control of external access permissions and traffic monitoring for development tools within the core business network segment to prevent the illegal transmission of sensitive data.

Security expert Michael Coates announced on the X platform that he has taken on the role of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at the Solana Foundation, marking a new chapter in his career. Coates previously served as the security chief at Mozilla, CISO at Twitter, and founded a startup focused on enterprise SaaS data security, Altitude Networks, which was later acquired by CoinList, thus entering the cryptocurrency industry.Coates stated that he chose to join Solana because the chain currently has a daily stablecoin trading volume of several billion dollars, with daily transactions exceeding the total of most cryptocurrencies. He mentioned that his future work will focus on integrating security capabilities into industry operations and application security foundations, addressing the unique security challenges of cryptocurrencies, and collaborating with policymakers and standards organizations to promote the improvement of cybersecurity regulations.

According to Jinshi reports, the Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC) has raised the maritime security threat level in the Strait of Hormuz to "severe."

The European Central Bank has requested banks to develop plans to address the growing cybersecurity threats posed by cutting-edge AI models such as Anthropic's Claude Mythos. In a letter to the chief executives of banks, the ECB's chief supervisory officer, Claudia Buch, asked lending institutions to submit action plans by the end of October.She urged banks to accelerate software patch updates, strengthen AI-driven cyber defenses, and enhance oversight of third-party vendors, while emphasizing that banks need to modernize their infrastructure in the long term. Buch stated, "The ECB calls on all significant institutions to immediately assess the impact of the evolving threat landscape and develop comprehensive action plans outlining specific measures to strengthen relevant controls." ECB President Christine Lagarde warned last month that artificial intelligence could lead to a financial crisis and stated that bank CEOs need to ensure they are prepared and recognize that countermeasures require substantial investment. The ECB has conducted cyber attack tests under severe scenarios on 109 banks, and most of the vulnerabilities identified have been addressed.

Michael Saylor stated on the X platform that Strategy has sold 3,588 bitcoins, cashing out $216 million to pay dividends on its digital credit securities. As of July 5, the company's bitcoin reserves have decreased to 843,775 coins, while holding a dollar reserve of $2.55 billion.This is the second public disclosure of a reduction operation by Strategy this year, following the sale of 32 BTC to cover preferred stock dividends from May 26 to 31, and the scale has significantly expanded, reflecting the company's increased reliance on selling part of its bitcoin reserves to maintain its dividend obligations amid pressure on bitcoin prices and growing unrealized losses.