Bybit Intercepts $700 Million in Potential User Losses During First Half of 2026
Bybit intercepted more than $700 million in potential user losses between January 1 and June 15, blocking over 30,000 suspicious withdrawal requests and protecting close to 20,000 users, according to a risk and security report it published on August 18.
That compares with $300 million intercepted across the whole of 2025 under what the company then called a new AI-driven risk framework. CryptoPotato reported the earlier tally alongside the 3 million credential-stuffing attempts Bybit said it blocked that year, when its recovery work covered roughly 4,000 users.
The company said the metrics should not be read as a guarantee of future performance or as a comparative ranking of exchanges.
“The cybersecurity arms race has entered an era of minutes,” said David Zong, Head of Group Risk Control and Security at Bybit, who noted that human judgment remains “at the center of critical security decisions.”
AI-Assisted Auditing
Bybit said AI-assisted auditing identified high-severity vulnerabilities at three to five times the rate of manual review, and that automation cut the time from security assessment to testing from about two weeks to two hours.
An automated red-team platform assessed 1,489 public-facing assets and flagged more than 100 high-severity vulnerabilities, with discovery to first penetration test down to under 24 hours. More than 100,000 alerts were processed with AI assistance. Monitoring now reaches 100% of business-relevant on-chain activity, including listed token contracts and the exchange’s cold, warm, and hot wallets. Also, the initial risk reviews averaged 4.7 minutes, with 95% finished within 10 minutes.
Bybit said it handled 10 incidents involving listed token projects with no platform losses, completing emergency responses ahead of other major exchanges in eight and detecting two before the affected projects did.
Lawsuit Freezes $30.5 Million
This comes shortly after Bybit sued North Korea, its Reconnaissance General Bureau, and the Lazarus Group in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, announcing on August 8 that it had secured a preliminary injunction freezing identified stolen assets.
It has recovered about $48.4 million and frozen more than $30.5 million across over 28 exchanges and custodians.
“Our focus has never changed: protect our users first, recover what we can, and make sure the people behind these attacks are held accountable,” stated Ben Zhou, Co-founder and CEO of Bybit.
In February 2025, attackers drained roughly $1.46 billion, by Bybit’s count, after compromising a cold wallet signing process. As reported, the FBI attributed the theft to the Lazarus Group, which US agencies valued at $1.5 billion and traced to more than 41,000 ETH.
Security firm Blockaid counted $1.1 billion stolen across 212 incidents marketwide in the first half of 2026.