100 North Korean IT hackers caught in six months, $5.8 million recovered: Ethereum Foundation security program report

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The ETH Rangers program, initiated by the Ethereum Foundation in collaboration with organizations such as Secureum and SEAL, concluded its 6-month run. During this period, 17 security researchers recovered or froze over $5.8 million in funds, reported more than 785 vulnerabilities, and identified approximately 100 North Korean IT workers who had infiltrated Web3 organizations. (Previous coverage: Ethereum Pectra upgrade officially delayed! Third testnet Hooli to launch, mainnet upgrade expected by late April at the earliest) (Background: Coinbase: Why we firmly believe in the value of Ethereum?) The final report reveals the results of these 6 months of security defense and offense through a series of intensive data points. The ETH Rangers Program was launched by the Ethereum Foundation at the end of 2024 in partnership with Secureum, The Red Guild, and Security Alliance (SEAL), with the goal of providing grants to individuals working on public goods security within the Ethereum ecosystem. The 17 grant recipients specialized in areas including incident response, threat intelligence, vulnerability research, and security education. The Foundation announced that the program has now officially concluded. The DeFiHackLabs team, led by SunSec, built the Incident Explorer platform during the program, which archives over 620 Proof-of-Concept (PoC) attack reproduction cases, complete with root cause analysis. The report notes that the team also hosted the PoC Summer Contest, receiving 43 new submissions, and conducted 6 workshops at various universities in South Korea. In terms of international cybersecurity competition collaboration, DeFiHackLabs partnered with HITCON CTF to design Web3 security challenges, attracting 717 participating teams. In the report, the Ethereum Foundation specifically highlighted the achievements of the Ketman Project. The project contacted approximately 53 Web3 projects and identified about 100 North Korean IT workers who had infiltrated organizations as contractors or developers. The research team open-sourced gh-fake-analyzer, a tool for detecting suspicious GitHub activity, and co-authored the "DPRK IT Workers Framework" with SEAL, which has now become an industry-standard reference for handling such threats. The research findings were also presented on stage at the world-renowned hacker conference DEF CON. Security researcher Nick Bax participated in over 36 SEAL 911 emergency incident response cases during the program, with the most notable being the recovery of $5.8 million in the Loopscale vulnerability incident. He also identified and notified over 30 projects that were employing North Korean IT workers and coordinated the freezing of related funds. Regarding threat awareness, the "North Korean Fake VC Scam" warning video produced by Bax accumulated over 200,000 views on X. Additionally, he discovered and disclosed the "ELUSIVE COMET" threat group's use of a Zoom homoglyph vulnerability to launch attacks; the vulnerability has since been patched. Guild Audits focused on security education in Africa and globally. Students reported over 110 vulnerabilities on mainstream bug bounty platforms such as Sherlock, Code4rena, and Immunefi, with many students ranking in the top 10 on these platforms and publishing over 55 technical articles. Most notably, on November 8, 2025, Guild Audits hosted the first Web3 Security Summit in Africa, advancing security education into regions previously rarely reached. At the protocol level, researchers conducted DoS stress tests on the five major Ethereum execution clients—Geth, Besu, Erigon, Nethermind, and Reth—discovering 14 bugs, including CPU asymmetric consumption (up to 4x) and node out-of-memory (OOM) crashes. The testing framework has been handed over to the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Security team.

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