The popularity of NFT as a concept is growing day by day, opening new spaces for digital content trade. However, all jobs that generate a large amount of money attract the attention of hackers and other malicious users.
Whether you are familiar with the NFT concept or not, its popularity is undeniable. Artists around the world are selling digital rights to their work to other users, who are apparently willing to pay serious money for digital ownership of a piece.
On the wave of NFT popularity, the OpenSea platform has become the most popular place to trade NFTs. Unfortunately, this information was also obtained by hacker groups that managed to make it easier for NFTs worth roughly $1.7 million by phishing attacks directly on users. Check out some of the more interesting NFTs in the gallery below.
Target users
Let's face it, the OpenSea platform is not hacked, per se, but its users have become the target of attacks. The attack was carried out via emails that were made to look like an update to the OpenSea community. The email asked users to migrate their listed NFTs to a new smart contract. To make matters worse, hackers did this only a day after the OpenSea platform announced its new smart contracts, so emails seemed less suspicious.
The report states that 32 OpenSea users were caught in a scam and signed a new smart contract that contained a code that transfers hackers' ownership of NFT to hackers. While 32 users doesn’t sound scary, given the price of NFTs, the stolen value is about $1.7 million. If you were wondering what NFT is, and how it works, everything is explained in 2 minutes in the video below.
On the bright side, some of the NFTs that were stolen have been returned to their owners, while some others have already been sold by the attackers. OpenSea has launched its own investigation to determine how hackers obtained users' emails and how they carried out this attack.
