• Latest
  • Trending
Scammers steal $150K worth of crypto from NFT project

Scammers steal $150K worth of crypto from NFT project

December 22, 2021
Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1

May 20, 2022
HP’s premium laptop revamp: more OLED displays, 12th-gen Intel CPUs

HP’s premium laptop revamp: more OLED displays, 12th-gen Intel CPUs

May 20, 2022
Android 13 beta will test out-of-the-box support for most braille displays

Android 13 beta will test out-of-the-box support for most braille displays

May 20, 2022
WhatsApp to Launch Cloud-Based Tools, Premium Features for Businesses

WhatsApp to Launch Cloud-Based Tools, Premium Features for Businesses

May 20, 2022
Huawei and SolarEdge Sign a Global Patent License Agreement

Huawei and SolarEdge Sign a Global Patent License Agreement

May 20, 2022
Dijbouti Telecom Welcomes the Landing of 2Africa Submarine Cable

Dijbouti Telecom Welcomes the Landing of 2Africa Submarine Cable

May 20, 2022
Ghana Smart Africa Digital Academy launches its national digital academy

Ghana Smart Africa Digital Academy launches its national digital academy

May 20, 2022
Ghana’s Rural Telecom Facilities to be Upgraded to 4G

Ghana’s Rural Telecom Facilities to be Upgraded to 4G

May 20, 2022
Silicon Power Announces UD90 PCIe 4.0 SSD

Silicon Power Announces UD90 PCIe 4.0 SSD

May 20, 2022
ZADAK Announces TWSG4S PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD

ZADAK Announces TWSG4S PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD

May 20, 2022
Samsung Sampling 512GB CXL Memory Module

Samsung Sampling 512GB CXL Memory Module

May 20, 2022
IBM Elastic Storage System 3500

IBM Elastic Storage System 3500

May 20, 2022
  • Consumer Watch
  • Kids Page
  • Directory
  • Events
  • Reviews
Sunday, 22 May, 2022
  • Login
itechnewsonline.com
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Africa Tech
  • InfoSEC
  • Data Science
  • Data Storage
  • Business
  • Opinion
Subscription
Advertise
No Result
View All Result
itechnewsonline.com
No Result
View All Result

Scammers steal $150K worth of crypto from NFT project

The attacker posted a fraudulent message from the project’s official channel

by ITECHNEWS
December 22, 2021
in Leading Stories, Tech
0 0
0
Scammers steal $150K worth of crypto from NFT project

Buyers hoping to get a limited-edition NFT from Fractal, a new marketplace for game item NFTs, were given an unpleasant and costly surprise on Tuesday morning when it was revealed that a link sent through the project’s official Discord channel was a scam set up to steal crypto.

Users who followed the link and connected their crypto wallets, expecting to receive an NFT, instead found that their holdings of Solana (SOL) cryptocurrency were emptied and transferred to the scammer’s account. An analysis posted on Medium by Tim Cotten, founder of another NFT gaming project, estimated the value of SOL stolen to be around $150,000.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1

HP’s premium laptop revamp: more OLED displays, 12th-gen Intel CPUs

Fractal is a startup project from Twitch co-founder Justin Kan specializing in the buying and selling of NFTs representing in-game assets. It was announced earlier in December and quickly amassed a following of more than 100,000 users through Discord — making it a target for the kind of scammers that have plagued NFT projects since the beginning.

News reached Twitter when a tweet from Kan informed followers that the announcements bot on Fractal’s Discord server had been hacked. Another tweet from the main Fractal Twitter account confirmed that a fraudulent link had been posted through the channel.

The attack took advantage of users hoping to mint NFTs, the term given to buying tokens at the moment when they are first created by a given project, rather than buying them on the secondary market at a later date.

Though the post from the Discord bot was fake, Fractal’s official Twitter account had posted a tweet just hours earlier hinting at an upcoming airdrop: a process where a crypto project distributes a number of tokens, usually to users who are early adopters. Since demand for token mints and airdrops is often very high, the pressure for users to move fast when snap announcements are made creates an attack vector that scammers are all too happy to exploit.

While the cryptography behind cryptocurrencies and NFTs is highly secure, the vast network of websites and applications that comprise the broader crypto ecosystem contains many possible vectors for attack.

A tweet from the official Fractal account suggested that the fraudulent message had been posted to Discord via a webhook. Webhooks are a feature of web application design that lets an application listen for a message sent to a particular URL and trigger an event in response — for example, posting to a certain Discord channel.

If a webhook is not secured with additional authentication measures, effectively anyone with the URL is able to post to the channel. It is not clear what, if any, precautions were taken by the team behind Fractal to prevent this from happening.

In the wake of the hack, a blog post from Fractal announced that victims who had lost money would be fully compensated. While apologizing briefly, the blog post also appeared to put some of the onus for security onto followers of the project, saying:

“If something doesn’t feel right in crypto, please don’t proceed, even if at first it looks legitimate. We must use our best judgement as there’s no ‘undo button’ in crypto.”

Fractal had not responded to a request for comment sent through the company’s official contact form at time of press.

Source: Corin Faife
Via: The Verge
Tags: cryptocurrencyexploitFractalScammers
ShareTweetShare

Get real time update about this post categories directly on your device, subscribe now.

Unsubscribe

Search

No Result
View All Result

Recent News

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1

May 20, 2022
HP’s premium laptop revamp: more OLED displays, 12th-gen Intel CPUs

HP’s premium laptop revamp: more OLED displays, 12th-gen Intel CPUs

May 20, 2022
Android 13 beta will test out-of-the-box support for most braille displays

Android 13 beta will test out-of-the-box support for most braille displays

May 20, 2022

About What We Do

itechnewsonline.com

We bring you the best Premium Tech News.

Recent News With Image

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1

May 20, 2022
HP’s premium laptop revamp: more OLED displays, 12th-gen Intel CPUs

HP’s premium laptop revamp: more OLED displays, 12th-gen Intel CPUs

May 20, 2022

Recent News

  • Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 May 20, 2022
  • HP’s premium laptop revamp: more OLED displays, 12th-gen Intel CPUs May 20, 2022
  • Android 13 beta will test out-of-the-box support for most braille displays May 20, 2022
  • WhatsApp to Launch Cloud-Based Tools, Premium Features for Businesses May 20, 2022
  • Home
  • InfoSec
  • Opinion
  • Africa Tech
  • Data Storage

© 2021 iTechNewsOnline.Com - Powered by BackUpDataSystems

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Africa Tech
  • InfoSEC
  • Data Science
  • Data Storage
  • Business
  • Opinion

© 2021 iTechNewsOnline.Com - Powered by BackUpDataSystems

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In

Add New Playlist

Are you sure want to unlock this post?
Unlock left : 0
Are you sure want to cancel subscription?
Go to mobile version