The Record reports that hackers are interested in NFT: recently, users of Nifty Gateway, a marketplace for buying and selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) owned by Gemini, have been complaining on social networks about hacking their accounts. The victims say that from them have been stolen digital art worth thousands of dollars.
This is one of the first known cases of digital art theft, but the growing interest in NFT suggests that this is unlikely to be the last such incident. The fact is that last year alone, the NFT market grew by almost 300% and is now valued at about $250 million, which makes it an attractive target for cybercriminals.According to numerous complaints from victims, the kidnappers hacked into valid user accounts, negotiated sales through Discord, and then donated the stolen NFTs to buyers on Nifty Gateway for free.
Publicly available records of Nifty Gateway auctions show that buyers often quickly resell stolen NFTs, sometimes dropping their original price several times (by several thousand dollars) to spur sales. Apparently, the criminals and their intermediaries hoped to quickly launder the stolen goods using a chain of semi-legal transactions, thereby making it difficult for Nifty Gateway to investigate.
Representatives of Nifty Gateway have already announced that they are aware of what is happening, but emphasize that the platform itself has not been compromised, and a “small number” of users have suffered from the attacks, whose learned records have been compromised in other ways.
The Nifty Gateway administration encourages users to carry out transactions exclusively through the company’s trading platform, as well as to use two-factor authentication, which is not mandatory on the site.
It is unclear if Nifty Gateway is going to help affected users to recover stolen art. Judging by the reports of users, so far they have not been able to return the stolen NTFs and compain about the incident.
Just in case, let me remind you that ESET warns that sex toys are unsafe.
