Borrowed Trust

Week in 60 Seconds

• THORChain: Four vault wallets were blacklisted at 12:09 UTC on 9 October and released 3 hours 21 minutes later. The sources reviewed contain no explanation from Tether and do not link its action to a specific case.
• XRP Ledger: A 9 October disclosure describes a calculation error that could have created XRP. The safety check repeated the same error and failed to catch it. The fix shipped on 25 September. The report found no evidence of exploitation on any public network.
• BeyondTrust: Attackers exploited an unpatched Remote Support flaw on 29 August. BeyondTrust says its sensors detected the attacker gaining greater access, but another vendor's alert-review tool dismissed the warnings as false alarms.
• SlugFest: Bloom researchers found more than 1,500 software packages with a publishing weakness. Someone who claimed a previously used code repository name could have gained permission to publish updates. The report does not establish a malicious compromise.
• Starknet: A non-binding poll asks whether to research becoming an independent blockchain with protection against quantum-computer attacks. A yes vote would begin research, not a migration.
• Freeze Ledger: 62 freezes of $200K or more, worth $74.94M, about three and a half times last week's value. Tuesday and Wednesday account for more than half.

THORChain: Four Vaults on Tether's Blacklist

On Friday 9 October, THORChain technical co-founder Chad Barraford said on X that Tether had blacklisted the protocol's vault addresses on Tron. Cointelegraph reported that four wallets holding about 1.45 million USDT were frozen and that THORChain had received no prior communication from Tether. Barraford wrote that he hoped the action had been "made in error / misunderstanding". Tether did not respond to Cointelegraph. The sources reviewed for this issue contain no public explanation from the issuer.

The USDT contract's own records on Tron fix the timing. All four addresses were added to the blacklist in the same block, at 12:09:42 UTC on 9 October, and removed between 15:30:33 and 15:30:39 UTC, 3 hours 21 minutes later. TSN Media identified the four as THORChain vaults by matching them against the network's public vault list, and reports that no USDT left them while they were listed.

THORChain's vaults hold the pooled assets the network uses to complete swaps between blockchains. They are controlled collectively by its node operators rather than by an individual.

Blacklisting a shared vault restricts its USDT balance, potentially affecting multiple users rather than a single holder.

The freeze came during a wider run of Tether blacklisting that day. Bitquery's investigation into thefts from Ledger devices sold through CryptoBilis, a reseller in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, places that activity between 12:09 and 14:10 UTC on 9 October.

In an update published on 16 October, Bitquery raised its count to 335 wallets across six chains. Its estimated loss remained $102.0 million. It reports that about $23.9 million of the stolen funds, held in USDD, a stablecoin Tether cannot freeze, was swapped into ETH through THORChain. Tether has not said whether its action against the vaults was connected to the case.

Bitquery's own tracing shows how easily shared infrastructure can be misread. In a correction dated 12 October, it reclassified four wallets it had labelled an OTC-style group as THORChain vaults. It also withdrew a Binance lead, because those payments belonged to other THORChain users. The sources reviewed do not establish whether these are the same four addresses Tether froze.

Funds passing through shared infrastructure do not make every user of that infrastructure one actor.

XRP Ledger: A Check That Shared the Flaw

On 9 October, the XRP Ledger's developers published a vulnerability disclosure for its payment engine, the part of the software that routes payments through offers on the ledger's exchange.

When a single payment used hundreds of offers, the engine added their XRP amounts together. But it did not check whether the total exceeded the limit its number format could hold. Beyond that limit, the total rolled over to a small number, an error called overflow. The engine could then pay the sellers in full while charging the buyer only that smaller amount, creating XRP that should not exist. The flaw affected xrpld 3.4.0 and earlier, and the report says it may have existed since the payment engine was written in 2015.

The ledger has a safeguard for exactly this outcome. After each transaction, the computers running the network check that basic rules still hold. One rule is that a transaction must not create XRP. But that check added up the balance changes using the same arithmetic, without checking for overflow. Its total rolled over too, so it failed to spot the problem.

The safety check repeated the calculation's mistake.

The issue was reported through the bug bounty programme on 22 September. The fix shipped in xrpld 3.4.1 on 25 September, two weeks before the public report. The report says the developers found no evidence that the issue was exploited on any public network.

BeyondTrust: Trusted Messages, Dismissed Alerts

On 15 October, BeyondTrust disclosed CVE-2026-102764 in its Remote Support product, rated 9.3 out of 10 on the CVSS v4 severity scale. Its advisory describes a flaw that allowed file operations on the appliance because internal messages were not properly checked for their source. Remote Support is used by IT and help-desk teams to connect to and control other computers, so the appliance holds access to the systems it serves.

The internal messaging components did not adequately check where messages came from.

According to BeyondTrust's account, attackers exploited the then-unpatched flaw on 29 August against two customers: one using BeyondTrust's hosted service and one running its own appliance. After another security vendor's compromise became public on 27 September, BeyondTrust began hunting for similar activity. On 28 September it found signs of intrusion at one customer and says it contained the affected system 27 minutes after first detection. Mandiant's findings from the self-hosted customer, shared on 30 September, confirmed them.

BeyondTrust released the patch on 8 October and says all cloud-hosted Remote Support systems were patched by 9 October. Mandiant's investigation attributes the exploitation to a suspected China-linked espionage group it tracks as ARMORY CASTLE.

BeyondTrust's own detection did respond during the intrusion. The company says its sensors raised alerts as the attacker gained greater access. But the alert-review tool built into another vendor's detection platform dismissed them as false alarms.

The sensors raised the alarm. Another vendor's tool dismissed it.

These are separate failures. The vulnerability let the attacker in. The dismissed alerts were a missed opportunity to catch the intrusion, which BeyondTrust found through a later hunt, a month after the exploitation began.

SlugFest: Publishing Rights Tied to a Name

npm is a registry where developers publish software packages for others to use. Its Trusted Publishing feature lets a named automated process on GitHub publish a package without storing a permanent password or access token. Instead, that process receives a short-lived credential proving it has permission to publish.

On 13 October, researchers at Bloom described a weakness in how that link was recorded. The publishing permission was tied to the owner and name of a code repository, plus the filename of its automated publishing process. GitHub's permanent numeric identifiers were recorded only after the first successful publication.

If the original repository was renamed, transferred or deleted before that first publication, someone else could claim the old name. By adding a publishing process with the matching filename, they could obtain valid permission to publish. They did not need to steal an existing access token.

Until the first publish, the right to publish followed a repository's name, and a name can be claimed by someone else.

Bloom says it found more than 1,500 vulnerable packages with over 10 million combined downloads. It tested the attack in a package namespace it owns and did not publish a list of affected packages. It also says it blocked its customers' AI agents from downloading some of the vulnerable packages. The report documents exposure and a controlled test, rather than a confirmed malicious compromise.

Bloom reported the issue to GitHub on 6 June. The fix is npm's 48-hour expiry change, announced through GitHub's changelog on 2 October. Publishing permission now expires if it is not successfully used within 48 hours of being set up. Changing the repository or project identity requires that permission to be set up again. Bloom says npm did not adopt its proposed alternative: recording the permanent numeric identifiers at the start. It adds that npm's Trusted Publishing integration with GitLab had the same issue.

Starknet: Questioning the Dependency

On 15 October, a governance post opened a non-binding, seven-day Snapshot poll on whether Starknet should research becoming an independent blockchain with security designed to resist quantum-computer attacks. The post follows a StarkWare announcement on 8 October.

The post argues that Starknet can soon protect the parts it controls against quantum-computer attacks. But its bridge to Ethereum and its use of Ethereum to make transaction data available must follow Ethereum's timetable. It says user accounts can already adopt quantum-resistant signatures without upgrading the whole network.

A yes result would start a research effort, followed by more detailed proposals and further polls. A no result would continue that security work with Starknet remaining a Layer 2 network built on Ethereum. The post says STRK remains the token, with no new token, and that bridges from Ethereum would stay open.

The poll can start research into Starknet's dependence on Ethereum. It cannot move Starknet off Ethereum.

Weekly Freeze Ledger

62 freezes • $74.94M frozen

The ledger covers Saturday 10 October through Friday 16 October 2026, counting issuer-enforced freezes of $200K or more across Ethereum, Tron and XRPL. Each row covers the 24 hours ending at 21:00 UTC on that date.

Recorded value rose to about three and a half times last week's $21.08M, with 62 freezes against 47. Tuesday and Wednesday together account for $42.83M, about 57 per cent of the total. Tuesday recorded the largest value, 10 freezes worth $24.43M, and Wednesday the most freezes, 19 worth $18.40M. Thursday's digest lists 14 of its 15 entries at the same 14:01 UTC timestamp. No digest was published for Monday. Tether’s USDT contract on Tron records four blacklistings that day, none holding $200K or more; Ethereum and XRPL were not independently checked. Friday recorded three freezes. The digests do not attribute these freezes to a specific case.

Daily amounts are rounded as published in the digests; the weekly total sums those rounded figures.

These figures count freeze actions. They do not show how much remains frozen or how much was later recovered.

Source: The Cipher Index Stablecoin Freeze Tracker

What to Watch

For THORChain, whether Tether explains why it blacklisted the vault addresses.

For Starknet, the poll result at the end of its seven-day run, and whether a yes leads to a research proposal.

For USDC, the European Banking Authority classified it on 14 October as the first significant e-money token under MiCA. From 12 November, supervision of the European issuer is split. The EBA takes responsibility for the issuer's reserves, ability to meet withdrawals, capital, and recovery and redemption plans. France's ACPR retains oversight of governance, ownership and fit-and-proper assessments, outsourcing and conflicts of interest.

For Australia, Treasury's consultation on crypto reporting, which would implement the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework alongside a domestic regime, is due to close on 28 October. ASIC's proposed standards for digital asset and tokenised custody platforms are open until 27 November, ahead of the new regime starting on 8 April 2027.

Corrections and Continuing Investigations

Ledger and CryptoBilis. Bitquery's figures have been revised several times; its latest update, on 16 October, added 11 wallets that lost mostly TRX and left the $102.0 million estimate unchanged. This update was published after the edition's intelligence cutoff. Bitquery attributes the hardware explanation to Ledger: an implant reads the wallet's recovery phrase during setup and sends it out over a built-in SIM. The recovery phrase lets whoever holds it recreate the wallet and spend its funds.

Freeze attribution. Last week's ledger recorded twenty freezes displayed as $500.0K on 9 October. Bitquery reports that Tether froze $10.0 million in USDT across 20 wallets in the Ledger case. The addresses and transactions have not been matched, and the two figures are not treated as connected.

Ontology. Cryptopolitan reports that Ontology's main network stopped producing blocks for about 41 hours from 10 October, after a security warning about a project on its chain. The report says the halt was coordinated with most of the nodes responsible for agreeing on new blocks. It quotes Ontology as saying no funds were lost from the network itself. The account does not name the affected project, establish whether its users lost funds or provide a technical explanation.

BeyondTrust. Mandiant attributes the exploitation to ARMORY CASTLE, which it describes as a suspected China-linked espionage group. In an update on 16 October, BeyondTrust says it knows of only the two affected customers described above.

Further Reading

• The Power to Pause, the previous Nexus Report, examines Arbitrum's Stylus pause and settlement guard, ESMA's stablecoin opinion and FinCEN's withdrawal of two proposed rules.
• XRPL vulnerability disclosure report, the developers' account of the overflow and the invariant check.
• BeyondTrust on BT26-05, the company's timeline and account of the dismissed alerts.
• Bloom's SlugFest research, with the full trusted-publishing mechanism.
• Bitquery's Ledger CryptoBilis investigation, including its dated corrections.

Published by the Zero Trust Network. Research supported by CipherBot and CipherIndex.