World’s largest NFT marketplace OpenSea hacked, users lost NFTs
World’s largest NFT (non-fungible token) marketplace, OpenSea on Sunday confirmed that it has been hit by a phishing attack and at least 32 users had lost their valuable NFTs worth $1.7 million.
Question is how did this come about, and how were people so easily fooled into believing this email was legit. Read this👇
OpenSea planned upgrade stalls as phishing attack targets NFT migration
Just yesterday, OpenSea announced a smart contract upgrade, which requires users to migrate their listed NFTs from Ethereum (ETH) blockchain to a new smart contract. As a direct result of the upgrade, users that don’t migrate over from Ethereum risk losing their old, inactive listings — which currently require no gas fees for migration.
Opensea was quick to put out a tweet warning the community.
I guess this is a lesson for the future not only for NFT platforms but also users. The cryptocurrency world brings out a abundance of scammers. Always beware of clicking on links as often they look very official, these days that means nothing!!!
I’m not the biggest OpenSea fan, but I think in this case they were unfairly blamed. Phishing attacks are common and tough for the platform to prevent.
Also, the attackers probably are going to have trouble selling the NFTs – since the tokens are by definition non fungible, buyers can easily see if they are stolen or not.
Yeah it was all about the scammers timing that made it so believable. I think the lesson is more for users. Also a lot of NFT collectors are new and possibly don’t know how common this is.
Agreed Norman. I listened in a twitter space as soon as it happened with over 1500 people in there. Everyone was panicking and pointing the finger without knowing what truly happened. I myself received this email and never clicked it. Even when I get sale notifications I go directly to my opensea account and log in with my wallet instead of clicking email links. The email looked entirely real like it came straight from OpenSea. This is going to happen more and more as NFT and cryptos evolve.
Great article Stacey! It’s amazing how some of these emails actually look. The scammers made sure to make it look perfect like it was actually coming from OpenSea. I always tell new NFT community members don’t click links in emails, instead go to the actual website and log in there. It’s so scary nowadays with privacy and security measures. When I heard this news I had already migrated my listings so I almost had a heart attack. I was glad to hear it was a phishing email. This should be a warning for anyone getting into the nft space. Thanks for sharing!
