How do smart-contract auditors stay on top of real-time exploit news? I feel like I’m always late.

Speaking from experience, the trick isn’t chasing every exploit — it’s structuring your inputs so incidents reach you before Twitter explodes. My daily workflow looks like this:

1. Rekt News + BlockThreat + Cyfrin’s briefings → these three usually catch critical incidents early and summarize post-mortems accurately.
2. Twitter/X lists → instead of following 200 people, I maintain one private list with researchers like @samczsun, @bertcmiller, @spreekaway, @0xQuit. This filters 90% of noise.
3. Discord/Telegram alerts → MEVSEC and ScamSniffer have “live alerts” channels. These often trigger before full write-ups exist.
4. Monitoring dashboards — tools like Phalcon, Tenderly alerts, and EigenPhi give early hints when weird contract behaviour starts.

Honestly, once you systemize this, you’ll stop feeling late. Most juniors are overwhelmed because they try to consume everything manually. Build a workflow that brings the right data to you — not the other way around.

One thing juniors miss is that some exploits surface first inside bug-bounty ecosystems, not Twitter. Immunefi, Code4rena, and Sherlock often publish disclosures before mainstream sources. I check Immunefi’s disclosure feed every morning — it teaches you exploit patterns months before they trend.

Another underrated tactic: run Slither or Echidna on trending contracts yourself. When you manually inspect vulnerabilities, you start seeing patterns like unprotected delegatecalls or storage collisions before the write-ups even drop.

My own “early-signal kit”:

• Immunefi disclosures

• SlowMist + CertiK alert feeds

• A tiny Telegram group with 5–6 researcher friends (peer networks beat algorithms)

• Tenderly’s anomaly notifications

Don’t aim for “full coverage.” Aim for pattern recognition. Once you know how an exploit class behaves, you can interpret signals faster than any news source.

One thing I want to add to what others have already shared is that staying updated isn’t just about consuming signals — it’s about understanding which signals matter to your work.

When I was new, I subscribed to every feed: Rekt, SlowMist, Immunefi, half of CryptoTwitter. I thought “more sources = more awareness.” It actually made me slower. I’d skim 20 incident reports in a week but not internalize anything.

What finally changed my pace was asking myself one question: “If this exploit happened inside my project, what early indicators would I have actually seen?”

Once you start looking at incidents through that lens, your filter sharpens dramatically. Reentrancy cases? → monitor suspicious repeated calls + abnormal gas patterns. Access-control leaks? → track admin-key usage spikes. Price-manipulation vectors? → watch oracle update irregularities.

Suddenly the feeds aren’t noise anymore — they’re patterns. And patterns are much easier to digest than raw news.

So yes, follow the right people and tools, but also build a habit of “mini post-mortems” for yourself. It turns exploit updates from overwhelming events into learning loops that genuinely improve your audit instincts.

What helped me stop feeling lost was switching from random surfing to time-boxed consumption. 20 minutes morning + 20 minutes evening. I follow Rekt, DeFiSafety, and a curated Twitter list. That’s it. The consistency matters more than volume.

This is one of the most common gaps juniors report — real-time exploit tracking feels overwhelming until you build a repeatable system. If you’re strengthening your security fundamentals, you may also find these threads useful: 

Smart Contract Security Audits Hub (deep-dive patterns & workflows) → https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/smart-contract-security-audits-hub 

Threat Modeling for Juniors — assumptions that break in real audits → https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/threat-modeling-for-juniors-do-you-test-assumptions-before-they-break

Handling Production Incidents as a Junior Solidity Engineer → https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/handling-production-incidents-as-a-junior-solidity-engineer-how-do-you 

If you're building a long-term career in audits, bookmark these flows — they help you stay current without burning out. Happy to see more security-focused questions inside AOB.

Bringing this thread back because “real-time” is messy unless you have a triage step. What helped me wasn’t adding more sources — it was deciding how I confirm an exploit is real in 10 minutes.

My quick sanity check:

Is there an on-chain transaction trail I can actually inspect (contract / attacker / exploit tx)?

Any first-party signal yet (protocol Discord, status page, dev response, emergency pause)?

Do we have a root-cause hint (price manipulation, access control, bad upgrade, reentrancy) or is it still just “funds moved”?

If it fails those checks, I tag it as “rumor / watch” and move on. Curious: does anyone keep a small “incident notebook” (exploit → root cause class → prevention signal) so patterns stick?

Yep — I actually do keep a tiny “incident notebook,” and it’s the only thing that stopped real-time smart contract exploit news from feeling like doom-scrolling.

Mine is super lightweight: incident name + first reliable source I saw + exploit tx / contract address + root-cause class + “what signal could’ve warned me earlier?” That last column is the real value. After 15–20 entries you start noticing patterns (oracle weirdness, access-control mistakes, upgrade/initializer footguns, reentrancy-ish flows, etc.) and your brain gets faster at triage. 

Also: I’ve stopped trying to follow every security news source. I keep one “fast alert” lane (something that pings when on-chain behavior looks off) and one “clean recap” lane (post-mortems that explain why it happened). Otherwise it’s just noise wearing a “breaking” label. 

Open question back to you (and everyone): when you add something to your incident notebook, what’s your “proof threshold” that it’s real — an exploit tx, a protocol Discord/status update, a specific researcher confirming, something else? 

And do you track the false alarms too (rumors you tagged “watch” and later turned out to be nothing) — or do you delete those?