By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 22nd, 2024
OpenSea shared a tweet saying it is investigating the incident.
The Discord server of OpenSea, the world’s largest Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace has been compromised according to a series of tweets that confirmed the incident. Per a screenshot from the Discord channel that was hacked as shared by the independent crypto reporter, Colin Wu, the hackers shared an announcement telling members that OpenSea now has a partnership with the YouTube video streaming platform.
The official OpenSea Discord was hacked and posted a link to a phishing site in partnership with youtube. On April 1st, a large number of blue-chip NFT DISCORDs were hacked and posted phishing links. pic.twitter.com/uDbNklIgn3
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) May 6, 2022
Stemming from the partnerships, the hacker’s announcement says the duo is launching a limited edition NFT collection that features 100 unique tokens. A link, which has been identified by Peckshied as a Phishing link, was provided to the fake collection which shows YouTube but does not lead to the social media giant’s platform.
As with related phishing attacks, the hackers claimed there is limited access and prompted the members of the OpenSea community to hurry in claiming their spot. In response to the compromise, OpenSea shared a tweet saying it is investigating the incident.
“We are currently investigating a potential vulnerability in our Discord, please do not click on any links in the Discord,” the tweet reads
The attacked channel has been blocked by the trading platform so that its users will not gain access to it. As of the time of writing, it remains unclear whether any OpenSea member fell for the scam and lost money, or NFT for that matter.
OpenSea Compromise Is One Out of Many
Despite the technological and innovative advances in the crypto and NFT world, platforms have not in any way been spared from the threats posed by hackers. The NFT world has received a number of attacks lately with the Instagram account of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT also recently hijacked by these cybercriminals.
The attack on the BAYC Instagram account resulted in a whopping sum of $2.8 million moved from members of the community who fell for a fake minting prompt. The growing attack on NFT platforms is a sign that more security infrastructures are necessary to be put in place to wade off future compromises.
Despite the fact that there is a growing evolution in the NFT and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystems, security advances are expected to match up with the schemes of cybercriminals. Before these two facts catch up with each other, however, NFT platforms are expected to be proactive in educating their members so as to arm them with the tricks being employed by these hackers to rob them of their hard-earned funds.