Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) marketplace OpenSea is investigating a “phishing attack”, which according to the company’s CEO, Devin Finzer, is no longer active.
A tweet from Devin Finzer read “We don’t believe it’s connected to the OpenSea website. It appears 32 users thus far have signed a malicious payload from an attacker, and some of their NFTs were stolen”.
NFTs joined the biggest league of digital assets thanks to a surge in the demand for them. NFTs are collectable digital assets that hold value as a form of cryptocurrency and as a form of art or culture. NFTs are unique because they are non-fungible. A fungible asset is something with units that can be readily interchanged – like money; their unique properties cannot be interchanged with something else. Ownership of these assets is recorded on a blockchain — a digital ledger similar to the networks that underpin Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
According to OpenSea’s CEO, some of the NFTs which were stolen in the phishing attack has been returned. Through subsequent tweets Devin Finzer made, he revealed that some of these NFTs have been returned and also added debunked rumours that the hack was worth $200 million. He mentioned that the hacker “has $1.7 million of ETH in his wallet from selling some of the stolen NFTs”.
The phishing attack comes after a series of hacks on various cryptocurrency exchange platforms. Last month, crypto platform Crypto.com admitted that 400 of its customers were hacked and assets worth more than $30 million were stolen. In December, crypto exchange platform Bitmart also was hacked $196 million worth of cryptocurrencies. Bitmart called the attack “a large-scale security breach” saying that $150 million in crypto assets was withdrawn from its platform. In what was described as the biggest crypto hack of all time, crypto exchange Poly Network was hacked of $610 million worth of crypto assets. These funds were, however, returned by the hacker who identified as “White Hat”.
