By Shelly Melancon (Switzerland)
Animoca Brands and Blowfish Studios have committed to refunding users who lost their money in staged NFT drops on Discord. Hackers staged the NFT drop at about 4 pm UTC. The attack occurred on the Phantom Galaxies server on the 19th of this month. From the beginning of the attack to the end, users engaged in about 1,500 transactions.
Details Of The Attack
The Discord channel for the Australian game being built has well over 90,000 users. Hackers infiltrated the channel with a bot containing malicious software that included the admin’s authorization details. The hackers went on to ban all admins on the channel after gaining control. These types of attacks are becoming more commonplace in Discord.
The hackers in the announcements, posing as the admin, said that they would have a surprise NFT drop. They told users that the company had restocked on NFTs and were extending the minting of NFTs. Hackers gave users links to a fake NFT minting platform. On the platform, the hackers charged the users 0.1 ETH to mint the tokens.
The chairman of Animoca Brands, Yat Siu, tried to warn users of the attack an hour after it started at 5 pm UTC in a tweet. He informed users that lost their money to hackers would be adequately reimbursed. The company supported the chairman’s statement on the 24th of November in a press release. The company has said that they will release the plans for the reimbursement soon.
The project lead for an NFT project in development based in California, known as Woodz, said they lost $1000 in the attack. Woodz only suspected foul play after they had paid for two fake NFTs. Woodz disclosed that the low gas fees put them off as well as the contract. They weren’t quite sure what, but they knew there was a problem somewhere. The attack followed the one on the 11th of November, which was a hack on Beeple, a famous NFT artist.
Beeple Discord Attack
Users on the 11th of this month felt that they were about to get a good deal on quality NFTs. They ended up losing their funds to hackers that had taken control of an admins account. During the fake NFT drop, users lost a total of 38 ETH.
An admin confirmed later that the hackers had gained control of an admins account and the announcement bot despite all the necessary discord security measures taken. The hackers went on to make announcements saying Beeple was organizing an NFT drop. This attack at the time was the most recent in a series of attacks that have taken place on Discord.
Cybersecurity firm RiskIQ revealed that a lot of cybercriminals were beginning to gravitate towards Discord. The company discovered over 25 different malicious software hosted by Discord Servers. In April of this year, Talos Intelligence also disclosed that cybercriminals were using apps like Discord to target those forced to stay at home during the pandemic.
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