Amid a series of NFT scams and phishing attacks, leading NFT project Azuki falls victim to a Twitter hack that results in a loss of over $750,000 worth of USD Coin (USDC). The sudden attack and money leak took place in the span of 30 minutes. This is another bleak day for the NFT community, with rampant attacks against several top founders and projects occurring one after another. Read on to find out more about the incident.
How did the Azuki Twitter hack happen?
On Friday afternoon, the official Twitter of NFT innovators Azuki was hacked. The project’s community manager, Emily Rose, confirmed the news on Twitter minutes after the attack occurred. In the tweet, she warns users not to interact with or click on any of the malicious links posted on the account. The malicious tweet sent out a link asking followers to “claim land” in Azuki’s native metaverse, “The Garden.”
The hacked tweets were soon removed from the account, but administrators still warned against clicking any malicious links. Although, all the damage control was for naught. This is because, at the time, Azuki saw a wallet drain of over $750,000 USDC, 11 NFTs, and an additional 3.9 ETH. This link sent users to sign a “drain” contract to trick them into losing control of their wallets and transferring NFTs to the hacker.
The founder of the project, Hoshiboy, also confirmed the attack and explained that he is in talks with Twitter to resolve the situation. Also, the 750K USD drain happened from a single account. Azuki’s Twitter also states that the account is fully 2-factor authenticated. In the thread that alerts about the hack, the account also says that the project always sends its official communications through ALL its social networks at the same time: Twitter, Discord and the official website. Azuki’s website.
The Azuki Hack: Who did it?
To add to this, crypto detective @ZachXBT claims that this attack is one of a series of drains by a hacker known only as Lock. According to the crypto detective, Lock is the same hacker responsible for the compromise of the Mutant Hounds, AKCB and Chimpers Twitter accounts recently. In addition, there are those who believe that all these may be internal works of Twitter itself. Harry Denley of Metamask Security Research also caught on to the scam early and forced a domain lock on the platform. He claims that the hack may have taken place due to 3 key reasons:
- scenario a) password/cookie compromise.
- scenario b) twitter “god mode”: a program that allows Twitter staff to tweet from any account.
- scenario c) A malicious OAuth application.
Although, it states that “scenario a” is the most likely case. Phantom Wallet also blocked the domain on its platform soon after.
This is a strange time in crypto. The small but significant bull run remains stable. And yet, there are a number of phishing attacks and hacks happening almost every day. Also, there is a lack of security on the Twitter platform in general. NFTevening follows this story as it unfolds.
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