“Bait the hook well. This fish will bite.”
That’s what hijackers do. They hook in the bait well, and we bite them in search of filling our appetite. They contemplate the behaviors of our digital life and execute their plans bit by bit. There are millions of phishing attacks yearly around the globe, and thousands of them bind their victims and get successful.
One occurred recently when the attack directed at NFTs stole more than $150,000. The episode started out of nowhere when a hacker hooked bait and compromised the Twitter account of the well-renowned digital artist Deekay Kwon, a phishing attack on his followers.
The train left the station on the 12th of July, 2022, when a hacker launched an attack on the Korean illustrator and NFT designer's Twitter account, enabling a link to be posted on his account, which was back directed to a fake website.
It was no ordinary bait; the link was presented with a thumbnail allowing his followers to sign transactions associated with a malicious smart contract. The thumbnail was a tweet from his account declaring he was about to launch a limited and exclusive NFT collection.
The thumbnail bait lured his followers to click on it, as it goes;
"TheLetsWalk Collection Airdrop is now live! Only 1,000 lucky people CAN claim! Good luck!"
The tweet spread like a firestorm on his Twitter account, and why wouldn’t be? He has more than 180k followers!
The attack incorporated a fake link leading to a clone website mimicking Kwon's official front end. The phony website has some instructions to follow, which led the followers to claim the limited edition collection, and malicious NFTs.
When the victims tried to claim it, they consented to a transaction that was the central part of the bait. It enabled the attacker to get into their wallets. From that point, the dinner was served to the attacker on a plate; valuable NFTs started to wipe off from the victim's smart wallets.
As indicated by on-chain information, the attacker started plundering their NFTs around 03:43 CET that day, eventually engulfing around 65 NFTs in his pockets from multiple followers who were lured in before Deekay’s Twitter account could be recovered and erase the malicious post. The attacker acted fast and had the option to sell the stolen NFTs in the range of $80,000 - $91,000, a fortune if one might say. The remaining 50 NFTs have an actual worth of $52,000.
Around five hours after the attack began, Deekay tweeted the associated incident on his account, saying that he got his Twitter account back and apologized for the unfortunate event.
He stated;
“I got my account back. Apologies for this ugly event, and a sincere thank you to everyone who helped to inform others.” He also added to the statement that he overreacted for a long time because of the episode. He also asked anyone affected by the phishing attack to start commenting on his tweet to get in touch for a possible solution.
One victim tweeted under this thread, stating they were one of the individuals who got phished, all over losing 7 NFTs, 3 Azuki & 4 cool cats NFTs. Among these victims, one tweeted, “I clicked the sign button twice before I realized this seems shady,” an engineer at Coinbase, that’s what his profile reflected.
In another statement Deekay quoted;
We usually have two-factor authentication enabled on our social media accounts, and their “guess is that 2FA was turned off at that particular time, which led to this incident.”
Regardless of whether that was precise, it doesn't openly make sense how the digital artist credentials would have fallen under the hands of the attacker.
It can be possible that the artist played it and phished themselves, or the other story can be that he used his credentials somewhere else on the web. What's more, how could somebody turn off their two-factor authentication, for heaven's sake?
He also tweeted;
We are looking for a possible solution for repaying the actual victims affected by the attack. However, things are muddled "since [a] few are pretending to be affected and looking for opportunities."
After all the mess Deekay has been through, it seems like he is putting his faith in Karma. His last tweet to the incident thread was;
I truly believe in Karma. If you are good, then you'll have a fortune. If you are evil, you'll pay the price one way or another. Dear hacker, Karma is on your way.
Disclosure
Phishing attacks have been in the news and turning out to be progressively quite normal in the crypto space. If we go back 4 days from this particular incident, $8.6 million were stolen in crypto assets in a phishing assault focusing on Uniswap liquidity suppliers.
The attacks seem quite tricky and quite smart to lure in the victims. Almost $15 million are stolen every year alone in the US which is associated with phishing, and the numbers are increasing tremendously over the years.
Obviously, everybody should be careful and take necessary precautions while clicking or tapping on any links shared on social media platforms, and exercise necessary steps prior to making any moves that could uncover personal data i.e. bank details, or accidentally transfers digital assets to a malicious party.
P.S. At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned several cryptocurrencies & NFTs. Learn how to secure yours.
