The Story of Hackers in the NFT World – The Cryptonomist
The NFT industry boomed in the late 2020s and early 2021s. This development has also piqued the interest of hackers, who have exploited system vulnerabilities to steal large sums of money.
Increasing NFT theft by hackers
A market that continues to grow, both in ecosystem and in numbers, becomes more attractive to investors, but also to hackers.
Despite the strong bear market phase crypto just went through, the NFT sector continues to evolve and innovate, finding interesting applications the real and digital world.
Non-working token however, technology is still relatively new and as such has some shortcomings. Even the infrastructure of large projects does not enjoy extreme security, although they are not always the affected parties.
Sometimes users’ wallets are hacked or flaws in the platforms’ smart contracts are exploited. In other cases, users find themselves victims of the carpet pullsemployee theft or, a common industry practice, phishing scams.
Usually the latter is achieved by redirecting to links and/or websites that are copies of the original, through which one can get possession of the private keys of wallets after users authorize a “malicious” transaction.
In accordance Comparitechhis analysis, the first thefts date back to the beginning of the 2020s, as then increased at an increasing rate.
Since then, the total value of the hacks has turned out to be around 86 million dollarswith a total of 166 “thefts”.
The year 2022 experiences the highest volumes of digital thefts, and 31 were recorded in March alone.
The last entity hit was the Omni company, which suffered a 1.4 million dollar attack last month.
Biggest thefts in the NFT industry
From 2020 to the present, there have been many projects that have attracted some interest among hackers. Among the largest in history, calculated by the number of dollars stolen at the time of the attackin the first place is Lympoan NFT platform subsidiary of Animoca Brands, which had 165.2 million units of LMT tokens stolen (18.7 million dollars).
Right behind is Farmers World, a crypto-based game on the WAX blockchain, which had stolen more than 100 million yuan by November 2021, or around 15.7 million dollars.
In third place is probably the world’s most famous NFT gathering, Bored Ape Yacht Club. In April 2022, the official Instagram account hacked and used to lure some unlucky users to connect to their Ethereum wallet. The result was 10 NFTs from the collection stolenwith a total consideration of $13.7 million.
These will certainly not be the last, but there is a clear need for it raise awareness in society to prevent such attacks as much as possible. Additionally, as blockchain technology becomes more innovative, smart contracts, and consequently decentralized platforms, will become more secure and hackers will find it increasingly difficult to “hack the system”.
