The MRTD Research Desk produces MRTD.NET's coverage of crypto-security incidents, cyber news, and search/growth. We work AI-assisted under human editorial oversight, verify against primary sources and on-chain data, and link everything we cite. See our editorial standards and corrections policy.
A seed phrase has no reset button — lose it and the crypto is gone, with an estimated 2-4 million BTC already lost this way. Here's how to back up those words so they survive fire, theft, and the day you're not around.
As GTA 6 pre-orders open June 25, security firms report a surge of fake 'early access' sites taking irreversible crypto payments and pushing malware that drains wallets and intercepts 2FA codes. Rockstar is not selling early access -- here's how to tell the scams apart and protect your wallet.
Behind the 'wrong number' crypto-investment texts is a forced-labor industry: people lured by fake jobs, trafficked into Southeast Asian compounds, and made to run pig-butchering scams that cost victims an estimated $7.2B in 2025. Here's how it works -- and how to refuse it.
In 2026, ~65% of crypto's $11.36B in scam losses come from social engineering, not exploits — including ZachXBT-documented $91M and $282M cases. Here's how the manipulation works (fake support, panic plays, pig-butchering) and the hard rules that stop almost all of it.
Most crypto losses aren't exotic hacks — they're approvals you signed and forgot. Here's what a token allowance is, why 'unlimited' approvals are a standing liability, and exactly how to check and revoke them with Revoke.cash, Etherscan, or your wallet.
Late on June 19, a fake 'Extreme Alert' reading 'misantropi4' blasted to phones across Sao Paulo, Rio, Brasilia and beyond, overriding silent mode in the dead of night. Brazil's regulator pulled the national warning platform offline as federal police opened an investigation into a breach of critical public-safety infrastructure.
IndexNow covers Bing, Yandex and ChatGPT — but Google ignores it. Here's the evidence-based split: the two fast levers that actually get Google to index a new site, the myths that waste weeks (the Indexing API, sitemap pings, paid indexing bots), and a realistic checklist.
Public blockchains remember everything, so stolen funds leave a permanent trail. Here's how forensic firms follow the money, where mixers and bridges fall short, the choke points that enable freezes, and what actually gets recovered.
A bogus DMCA notice can knock a rival off Google for days with no court and no evidence — as a 2026 case against Press Gazette showed. Here's how takedowns actually affect rankings, why the '18-month penalty' is a myth, and the counter-notice playbook for victims.
On-chain trackers say the UXLINK attacker swapped ~14.6M DAI for 8,298 ETH and funneled 8,340 ETH into Tornado Cash on June 17, 2026 — while ~$10.5M in stolen DAI still sits in the open. A look at the fund flows and why the mixer is back in play.
Most crypto losses aren't exotic — they repeat the same handful of failure modes we see in every post-mortem: blind approvals, dust left in dead protocols, registrar and phishing weak points, and chasing thin-liquidity tokens. Here is a practical, no-hype defense checklist drawn directly from the incidents we've reported.
From July 1, 2026, Russia's central bank will restrict non-qualified retail investors to just three digital assets — Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT — with a ~$4,000 annual cap and mandatory risk testing. Everything else, including XRP and Solana, requires 'professional investor' status. It's an allowlist model for retail crypto, and other regulators are watching.
llms.txt — a proposed markdown 'map' for language models — now sits on roughly one in ten sites. But in 90 days of 500M+ AI-bot visits, only a few hundred fetched it, and Google has explicitly said it doesn't use it. Here's the honest split: near-zero value for AI search, real value for developer tooling.
A nonprofit's 27-year-old domain was moved into a stranger's account in minutes, with the DNS wiped — even though the account had dual two-factor auth and ownership protection turned on. The transfer didn't break the security; it bypassed it entirely, through GoDaddy's own support desk. That's the threat model everyone forgets.
Reddit appears in roughly 93% of AI-search opportunities and is the single most-cited source for Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. Yet most of that influence is invisible to users, and in 2025 the numbers swung wildly — ChatGPT's Reddit citations fell from ~60% to ~10% in six weeks. Here is what site owners should actually take from it.
Researchers found a dormant facial-recognition feature called 'NameTag' buried in Meta's AI companion app — face-matching, local databases, the works — shipped to an app with 50M+ installs. Meta removed it within about 24 hours of WIRED's report and insisted it was never enabled. Whether you believe that, 'built but switched off' is its own kind of warning.
A DOJ-led public-private operation disabled more than 1.4 million Southeast Asian scam accounts and made 63 arrests — yet froze under $4 million in crypto. The viral '$3 billion frozen' figure is wrong, and the real gap between accounts taken down and money recovered is the actual lesson.
Recent Chrome builds ship Gemini Nano — a ~4GB on-device AI model — downloaded in the background to power new built-in browser APIs. Running locally is a genuine privacy win, but a multi-gigabyte model installed without a clear prompt raises a fair consent question. Here is what is actually on your machine.
The US seized 127,271 bitcoin — about 0.64% of all the bitcoin ever mined — from Cambodia's Prince Group, the largest forfeiture in DOJ history. The coins sat untouched since 2020, yet were fully traced. Now the fight is over where $15 billion goes: a federal reserve, or the scam's victims.
Signal has again refused to comply with a reported UK plan to scan devices for illegal imagery, bundled with age verification. The objection is not about any single law — it is that client-side scanning is fundamentally incompatible with end-to-end encryption.
DeFi project DIP Protocol was drained of roughly $111,000 on BNB Chain through a token-transfer bug that let an attacker double-count pool reserves. Here is the class of flaw involved and why it keeps reappearing.
New vendor analyses spanning tens of thousands of domains suggest page-level SEO strength still correlates with being cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, yet a large share of AI recommendations never appear in traditional rank trackers. We separate the load-bearing tactics from the GEO hype.
SEO practitioners report large traffic gains from pruning junk indexed pages to free Google's "crawl budget." We break down what crawl budget actually is per Google's own docs, who it genuinely matters for, and a concrete reclamation playbook — while staying skeptical of the headline +67% figure.
An attacker exploited a settlement-boundary flaw in Aztec Connect's abandoned RollupProcessorV3 contract on June 14, 2026, draining roughly $2.19M in ETH and stablecoins. The privacy bridge was sunset in March 2023 and Aztec Labs holds no keys to pause it. The case is a reminder that "deprecated" is not "safe."