Recovery and Resilience

Authored by:

Jonathan Riss

CertiK

Key Takeaway: Recovery rebuilds trust in wallet infrastructure and supports affected people. Reconstruction never reuses exposed keys, governance closes exploited gaps, and long-term monitoring detects persistent surveillance or follow-on attempts targeting victims and replacement wallets.

Recovery focuses on safely restoring trust in the wallet infrastructure and supporting the people affected. Resilience means learning from the event to harden the entire system against future coercion attempts.

Human factors

• Provide psychological support and professional counseling for victims and their families.
• Assess whether the targeted individual can realistically continue in a key-holding role given their heightened profile and potential ongoing risk.
• Address broader team morale and fear by communicating clearly about new security measures and support resources.

Infrastructure reconstruction

• Do not reuse any seed phrases, private keys, or devices that were physically accessible during the incident, even if they appear untouched.
• Build a new wallet hierarchy from scratch and migrate remaining assets only after validating the new setup.
• Re-verify all multisig participants, threshold settings, and allowlists to ensure no attacker-controlled addresses or signers were inserted during the compromise.

Governance

• Revise travel, remote-work, and high-value transaction policies to close specific gaps exploited in the attack.
• Formalize "lessons learned" into the risk register and training materials so new team members understand why specific constraints exist.

Long-term monitoring

• Implement enhanced monitoring for the affected individuals and new wallet addresses to detect any persistent surveillance or follow-on attempts.
• Periodically re-assess the threat landscape to ensure the recovered posture remains effective over time.
• Maintain a relationship with threat intelligence and physical security partners to stay ahead of evolving coercion techniques targeting the sector.