Another cyber scam has hit the headlines when dozens of NFT owners of the OpenSea platform reported to have lost $1.7 million worth of digital art. They were targeted by criminals with phishing technology to sign over the digital assets over the weekends.
Blockchain security firm PeckShield said 32 OpenSea users were impacted with the phishing technique of criminals and 253 tokens were stolen Saturday evening, in just a three-hour period. Â The stolen tokens included Bored Ape Yacht Club and metaverse marketplace Decentraland.
It is being assumed the technique used a smart contract standard Wyvem Protocol that enabled the users to sign up a blank check for the criminals.
Phishing is a known cyberattack technique and it has been used by cyber attackers for years and security experts have warned it has evolved constantly and gradually becoming more sophisticated.
According to Sectigo cyber security firm chief security officer David Mahdi, the cyber attackers are gradually becoming smarter and can even enable attacks from the older results.
He suggested people consider checking the context, content and sender of emails instead of just keeping a watch on the worded emails and particularly if any financial transaction is involved in the message.
Meanwhile, OpenSea is investing in the latest cyber attack denying the platform was compromised at any time. Its co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer tweeted the attack did not originate on their website.
His tweet further added that they are working with the victims to narrow down the websites they had interacted with as these could be responsible for the malicious signatures.
OpenSea is an online non-fungible token and was founded in 2017 by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah. It is headquartered in New York City, the United States, and offers selling of NFTs on its platform through an auction or at a fixed price based on the Ethereum ERC-721 standard.
Its revenue touched $95 million in February 2021 and it increased to $2.75 billion in September 2021. In January 2022, its market value was at $13.3 billion. It holds dominancy in the NFT marketplace across the world.
NFT is an acronym for the non-fungible token and it is a non-interchangeable unit of data that is stored on a blockchain. It provides a public certificate of authenticity, which is proof of ownership, to assets. The underlying digital files are though not restricted from copying or sharing. It functions like cryptographic tokens and is not mutually interchangeable, unlike Ethereum or Bitcoin.