The Twitter account of digital artist Beeple was hacked in a phishing scam allowing the attackers to steal more than $70,000 (£55,638) in cryptocurrency.
Beeple, who’s real name is Mike Winkelmann, has become well-known for creating NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and selling them for huge amounts.
Yesterday, the artist’s hacked account posted links to a fake Louis Vuitton NFT raffle, which follows a real collaboration Beeple recently made with the luxury fashion house.
Earlier this month, Winkelmann designed 30 NFTs for the luxury fashion brand’s Louis The Game mobile game, which were embedded as rewards to players.
And the perpetrators of the attack took advantage of this to stage the fake raffle which, in turn, conned people out of their money.
Harry Denley, a security analyst at MetaMask, an Ethereum cryptocurrency wallet, alerted users that Beeple’s tweets containing the fraudulent raffle link were, in fact, a phishing scam that would drain the crypto out of users’ wallets if clicked.
The scammers posted similar phishing links from Beeple’s Twitter account, leading to fake Beeple collections promising one raffle entry for 1 ETH, which would be refunded if they did not win.
The phishing links were up on the hacked Twitter account for around five hours, and an analysis of one of the scammers’ wallets shows the first phishing link let the scammers steal 36 Ether, worth around £58,059 at the time.
The second link scored the scammers around £290,299 worth of ETH and NFTs from high-value collections such as the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. totalling around £348,358.
All told, the hack to Beeple’s account resulted in £348,358 being taken.
On-chain data shows the scammer selling the NFTs on OpenSea and trying to launder their stolen ETH.
Beeple later tweeted that he had regained control of his account.
Discord and the video game Axie Infinity are one of the many servers to fall prey to recent phishing attacks exploiting the rising popularity of NFTs and cryptocurrency.
What is Phishing?
Phishing is a type of social engineering cyber attack in which scammers trick victims into handing over sensitive information or installing malware.
‘Blockchain is still susceptible to traditional cybersecurity risks of fraud, such as phishing,’ said David Mahdi, an advisor at cybersecurity firm Sectigo.
‘It is no longer enough to watch out for crudely worded emails – recipients must also consider context, content and sender, particularly if financial transactions on the blockchain are involved,’
Beeple is a 3D artist, most famous for being the first to sell his digital artwork for a record-breaking £50.5 million worth of Ether cryptocurrency at a Christie’s auction.
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