ICP Security: Can the Internet Computer Be Hacked?

Can the Internet Computer be hacked? My answer is that the infrastructure is about as hard to break into as anything I have seen in crypto, but the apps built on top of it are not protected from poor design or from people on the inside. I still hold ICP, and I still think the chain is the safest place I know to put money in this market. What I do not believe is that every app on it is safe.

The two posts below show how that view came together. The first, from June 2026, argues that most cybercrime happens on centralized backends, and that ICP removes most of those weak points by putting code and data directly on a blockchain behind a layer of math. The second, from July 2026, came out of the Sonic exchange drain, which followed KongSwap being drained on ICP. Sonic was not a break in the chain. My first thought was that it was an inside job by people who already knew the project was dead. I hold that loosely, but it is the default I work from.

Here is the distinction I keep coming back to, from my post on the Sonic hack. When people say ICP is unhackable, they mean the infrastructure. Apps built on it are protected from attacks on that infrastructure, but not from their own weak design, and not from insiders who exploit loopholes. I also think "hacked" is the wrong word for many of these events. Drained by insiders, exploited, or stolen from is more accurate, because "hacked" suggests someone attacked the infrastructure, and that is the thing ICP mostly prevents.

The June post, How ICP Prevents Cybercrime by Removing Weak Backends, is where the argument starts. Most breaches come from centralized systems: admin panels, leaked credentials, insecure APIs, cloud misconfigurations and phishing. On a chain, the code and data sit behind math rather than a root password. I use my own website as the example. It is hosted on ICP, so nobody can swap a picture out or deface it with an AI tool. I also point out that a business that grows is usually worth attacking, and that it then has to pay heavily for a security team. Governments such as Pakistan and Switzerland face the same problem, and I think that is why the argument carries weight beyond retail crypto.

The Sonic post brings the argument back to the people who actually run these projects. I am not saying the apps on ICP are safe. I am saying the opposite: I am extremely skeptical before putting money into any of them, and I think most of crypto is run by teams that are not transparent. I am biased toward the chain itself, and I hold ICP because of the technology, not because I think it is immune to theft. The honest default for any project is to assume an inside job until proven otherwise, and to ask who had access to the keys.

If you want the wider context, what the Internet Computer is covers the basics, and my response to ICP's critics covers the other side of the debate.

Below this opening you will find the contents, then both posts in full, starting with the newest. Read them together and you get the whole argument: why the chain is hard to attack, why the apps on it are not automatically safe, and how to ask better questions when something gets drained. Nothing here is financial advice, and I am not a financial advisor. If you hold ICP or an app on it and want my take on your situation, you can book a personal video review with me.

Sonic Got Hacked. ICP Didn’t.

From my video published July 16, 2026.

Sonic is a quote-unquote "decentralized" — but maybe not — exchange on Internet Computer Protocol that just got hacked, and there is a very important learning opportunity here. I got a very excited text message this morning from one of you. If you want to be able to message me and ask questions whenever something like this happens, you can do exactly that when you join the Jerry Banfield Family.

The message I got this morning was about this Sonic hack. The exact post that was sent to me was Map Technical Forecasting's post talking about how we were told ICP was hack proof — you'd think the DEXs would be safe. First we see KongSwap get hacked and drained, and then Sonic. And the big question the post raised is this: is everyone on the ICP swaps a sitting duck? How do we know for sure the next one isn't going to be hacked and drained?

ICP Is Unhackable — the Apps Built on It Are Not

There was a great reply on that post, and before it was even posted, I had made the same basic reply by text within a few minutes as my response. What I said was this: when you say ICP is unhackable, it means the infrastructure — the blockchain. Apps that are built on ICP are protected from things that would attack the infrastructure, but they are not protected from their own potentially poor design. And more importantly, they are not protected from insiders exploiting loopholes.

My first thought when I saw that Sonic had been hacked was that this was an insider who already knew the project was dead. And it looks that way from what we read. What Moses said — inside job, not a hack — I absolutely agree with. That was my very first thought. Now, just because that was my first thought does not mean it's right. But my first thought was that this is an inside job: they know it's going to zero.

Stockholm said the same thing: "I don't know why, but I'm almost sure this is an inside job. The Sonic founder drained the Sonic DEX a while ago. It was abandoned — no team response. Then the owner started building the same DEX on Solana. Now they probably heard about multi-DEX, then decided to nuke his whole platform."

"Decentralized" Projects That Are Really Centralized

This is what you need to learn in crypto: most of these projects that claim they're decentralized are really just centralized projects that are trying to shield themselves from real accountability. And that means you have to be very careful where you put your money. Now, that's not financial advice — I'm not a financial advisor, and I'm all in on ICP. This is why I've withdrawn my attention from individual ICP projects, and this is why I avoid buying any coins besides ICP, because this is a risk that runs across all of crypto.

In fact, I can see us having a total crypto collapse at some point. When there's enough momentum — when coin prices keep going down, and people keep getting more and more skeptical that any of these projects are ever going to make a comeback — there is more and more of an incentive for teams to just quote-unquote "hack" their own project, exactly like what happened with Sonic. They are in the best position to know where the project is vulnerable and how to destroy it, and they can even intentionally set it up with a backdoor so that they could destroy it later. I imagine that as many of these cryptos start to plunge toward zero, a lot of them are going to just hack themselves, steal everything, and run off.

Transparency, Accountability, and a House of Cards

This is why investing in anything where the team is not transparent is extremely risky, and it's why I love ICP. You've got 180 people whose faces are posted online and who are accountable. And while the price chart makes it look like that same story happened with ICP, I've come to believe it was intentionally manufactured that way to protect the rest of the deception and lies in crypto.

I watched Bobby O's video today where the BitTensor TAO founder was up there talking about all of this. He compared it like this: he said the internet was the first big innovation, then Bitcoin was the second — and he skipped right over Ethereum and went straight to BitTensor TAO as the third big technical innovation of the last 30 years. That is so blatantly ridiculous and obvious — lying, in my opinion, extreme deception. And yet this guy has a platform and a stage, that's the message he's putting out, and that's what people are buying off of. It would be very easy for BitTensor TAO to go to zero in the future, because it's all a house of cards. There's almost nothing real there — and that's almost everything else in crypto. Everything else in crypto depends on people being ignorant of how all this stuff works.

So every time something gets hacked, every time an exchange goes down, I hope people in crypto are getting smarter and asking better questions. Because when you're taking painful losses, or you see other people taking them, that's the opportunity to learn and get smarter.

"Hacked" Is Not the Right Word

When I see things like Sonic getting hacked, it seems to me the word "hacked" is not very efficient here. I would say more directly that it was drained by insiders, or exploited, or that somebody stole from it. "Hacking" kind of makes it sound like someone used an AI tool or some hacking software and attacked the infrastructure — which is what a lot of cybercrime is based on, and which ICP prevents most of. So I'm grateful today for the motivation to put this together. I hope what I share always teaches you, educates you, and helps you.

To me, this should be the default assumption: I always assume almost anything like this is an inside job unless proven otherwise. When I hear that something was hacked by North Korean hackers, I don't believe that. I don't believe it was North Korean hackers. I often believe it was some insider at the company or the protocol, or it was some state actor — and North Korea is a convenient scapegoat. I don't believe it was North Korea, but who knows, and I don't want to get any more specific than that. That's just how I generally think, because there is so much lying and so much deception when it comes to money, and so many of these things are just blatant theft.

Bitcoin and Ethereum Were Dial-Up. ICP Is Fiber.

The more people in crypto realize that almost all of crypto is lying, cheating, stealing, and confusion, the better. And the simple truth, as I see it, is that ICP has infrastructure that is very valuable. I believe ICP is the one that's going to be the most valuable thing for the world to come out of crypto — not Bitcoin, not Ethereum. Bitcoin and Ethereum were kind of prototypes, the way dial-up internet was a prototype. It gave you an idea of what you could do, but it's clearly not the future. Once you get the real infrastructure — fiber-optic internet — you can actually do all the stuff you really want to do on the internet, and you don't need better infrastructure beyond that.

At this point, my cable company keeps trying to tell me I should get faster speed, and I don't know what they expect me to do with it. I don't need faster speed. I have one gigabit up and down. I don't need two gigabits up and down, because one gigabit is enough. In the same way, ICP as infrastructure is enough to solve most of the major problems in the world at the infrastructure layer. Now, what it doesn't solve for is apps and founders that are dishonest, that steal from their own protocols, that chase liquidity, and that are just doing anything to make money. It doesn't stop that — and that's the majority of crypto.

Modern-Day Organized Crime

Almost all of these apps and almost all of these blockchains, in my view, are theft. They are the modern-day organized crime. But instead of people being out in the streets with guns, they're on YouTube — some of them wearing masks, others saying ridiculous things. This is modern-day organized crime: groups of people working together to steal money from the masses, to prey on the ignorant masses.

Unfortunately, the primary solution is for the masses to stand up for themselves, to get more educated, and to get harder to rip off and harder to rob. It's the same as the laws we have here in Florida, which protect our citizens — in Florida, you don't want to rob somebody, because there's a good chance they have a gun also, and then you're even. In crypto, we need to strengthen people's minds and strengthen people's knowledge, and get more people to see the truth as I see it: ICP is the infrastructure, it's the safest thing in crypto for me to hold, and I believe it is the blockchain of the future. That's a big part of why I keep sharing everything I learn about it on my ICP Crypto playlist.

And that does not mean the apps on ICP are safe themselves. I am extremely skeptical before putting my money into anything, and in my experience, that is the ideal way to proceed.

Don't Panic by Yourself

If you enjoyed this, I would love to get to know you better in the Jerry Banfield Family, and I would love for you to be able to reach out to me anytime. You don't have to panic by yourself, or just go to random people on X and hope that somebody is going to say something useful. You can come straight to me. You can have calls with me every week, and you can connect with everybody else who's in the Family also.

To me, community is one of the best ways you get smarter, and one of the best ways you stay insulated from all the bullshit that's being put out all over the place — a community of people who are discerning, who are able to see through what's happening, and to see through to a simple truth like ICP. I invite you to be part of the Family, and I would love to get to know you better soon.

How ICP Prevents Cybercrime by Removing Weak Backends

From my video published June 17, 2026.

The Internet Computer Protocol is the best solution we have in the world right now for stopping cybercrime. Google has said cybercrime should be listed as a national security threat, and it's one of the biggest problems on the planet, costing humanity collectively around $10 trillion a year. This is exactly why I say the future of the internet will be built on ICP — because ICP is the best solution for cybercrime.

Why centralized backends keep getting hacked

Most hacks happen because centralized systems are private databases built directly on hardware. They have admin panels, credentials that can be leaked, insecure APIs or APIs vulnerable to AI attacks, cloud misconfigurations, phishing, all kinds of vulnerable backend servers, and endless complexity that guarantees there's somewhere to slip in. If you want to see how toxic that is, imagine going viral only to have your website get hacked — or notice how a big chunk of the internet sometimes goes down because one person in one place screwed up one small thing.

How ICP secures everything on chain

ICP stops the vast majority of cybercrime because of how it's built: it hosts everything directly on a blockchain. All the code and all the data are locked inside the blockchain, with a layer of math between the outside world and that code and data. That means you can't just go mess with it by getting the root password of a PC, phishing someone's office computer, exploiting an admin panel, slipping through a tiny firewall error, or having AI hunt down every possible little issue. Preventing cybercrime the old way is extremely expensive, and even then you usually can't prevent it. This hurts smaller businesses trying to grow the most: nobody targets you when you're unknown, but the moment you start to grow you have to start dumping money into a security team and experts, because now you're worth attacking.

My website, secured by math

My own site is the example. It's built on infrastructure where you can't go in and hack it — it's secured by math. You can't swap a picture out because you don't like me, or put something disgusting on it and get it taken down. If it were hosted on WordPress, somebody could probably use an AI tool to deface it on a whim. Hosting on the blockchain is also cheaper, because micropayments mean I only pay for what's actually used. Right now it's read-only, but even with Internet Identity added you can sign in securely directly on the blockchain. On almost any other website there's one way or another to hack it, especially with AI — and that's a serious problem if your business depends on the site not getting hacked or taken over by ransomware.

Insider threats, governments, and the real-world case

Insider cybercrime is huge too: someone with access to everything gets fired but kept a way back in, and now you're paying them off or they're selling access to someone else. On ICP you can have verifiable identities — fire someone, remove them, and they can't access anything or keep a backdoor. That's why ICP solves huge real-world problems for small and medium businesses, and even for governments like Pakistan and Switzerland that are tired of spending enormous amounts and still can't build anything securely. Pakistan, constantly spied on and unable to secure its own servers, sees ICP as one of its only real hopes of protection — and relative to retail crypto holders, a government has real money to move.

I host my own site on ICP for the same reason: the moment I go viral I'm at risk of someone coming in and messing with it. I've gone viral several times, and the old options were all bad — dump money in and it still crashes, pay a lot and don't go viral and waste thousands, or get caught on a cheap plan without enough hosting. So my website is on the best infrastructure in the world, and more and more developers are going to move their clients onto ICP to protect them, because if you host a client on junk infrastructure and their site gets hacked, you're the one who ends up liable. This is a huge narrative for ICP: the problem is $10 trillion, and if you base the valuation on being the best solution, the market cap should be at least $100 billion — if not closer to a trillion — just on what it can do for cybercrime. This obviously wasn't financial advice; I'm an ICP maxi because of the tech. If you want to go deeper, watch my ICP Crypto playlist.