On January 25, Kevin Rose, founder of the Moonbirds NFT Collection, had his personal wallet hacked, resulting in millions of NFTs being withdrawn from it.

The collective founder of PROOF sent out a tweet to his 1.6 million followers promising to look into the matter, which has since been linked to a malicious signature Rose provided to the attackers via the OpenSea Seaport protocol.

Introduced by OpenSea in May 2022, Seaport is an open source Web3 protocol that bills itself as “focused on security and trading efficiency”. Developed in Solidity assembly language, Seaport allows you to perform various functions on the Ethereum blockchain, including order filling, tipping, advanced filtering, and elimination of redundant transfers.

According to Rose, he was the victim of a classic case of social engineering known as a phishing attack, a cybercrime in which an attacker attempts to trick victims into giving up sensitive information, such as passwords or credit card numbers, by disguising themselves as a trusted source – in this case, OpenSea. .

The attackers managed to escape with 40 assets, including well-known NFTs from projects such as Cool Cats, OnChainMonkeys, Chromie Squiggles, Autoglyphs, QQL Mint Pass, Admit One Pass and others. Despite being flagged as stolen and reported to OpenSea, some of them have been resold in the last few days, including one Chromie Squiggle owned by Rose that was sold for 22 WETH.

This is not the first time a well-known Web3 builder has been targeted by signing a malicious transaction that is then verified by an OpenSea market contract. Three weeks ago thieves left RTFKT COO NFTs in the amount of $170,000 stolen during a phishing attack. And three months ago, a scammer named Monkey Drainer absconded with over $3.5 million worth of NFTs, also targeting victims with deceptive phishing techniques.

Phishing attacks are becoming an increasingly common problem. In the second quarter of 2022, the number of phishing attacks increased by 170% compared to the first quarter. report blockchain security company Certik.

Dorian Batika

Cryptooshala Member

Dorian Batytska is a journalist interested in art and technology. He has previously contributed to CoinDesk, Decrypt, Artforum, Artnet News, The Art Newspaper and many more. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @temp_projects where he often talks about current financial and art news, scandals and events.