Web3 security and smart contract auditing firm Fuzzland has prevented the loss of over $15 million in stolen crypto from about a dozen different exploits, co-founder Chaofan Shou said on stage at the Science of Blockchain conference in New York City. 

The firm, founded in early 2023, has developed two main strategies to recover funds: what Shou calls “hijacking” and “backrunning.” With attack hijacking, as the name implies, Fuzzland runs bots that can identify when a blockchain contract is being exploited and then will “hijack” the malicious actor’s efforts. Meanwhile, backrunning is the process of identifying potential victims and then preemptively draining their funds so that bad actors cannot.

To date, the largest exploit Fuzzland was able to disrupt was on DeFi protocol Sonne …