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Gordon Goner, Co-founder of BAYC Warns Users of a Potential Social Media Attack

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The pseudonymous co-founder of Yuga Labs and BAYC Gordon Goner, issued a warning concerning a potential upcoming attack on their social media accounts under the Yuga Labs umbrella after obtaining “reliable information” that an insider from Twitter would assist in bypassing the accounts’ protection.

Yuga Labs, which is home to some of the most popular nonfungible tokens (NFTs) such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Otherside, straight away sought Twitter for security after learning about a planned attack on its social media accounts.

BAYC is not new to attacks

Following the community’s warning, Twitter management began aggressively monitoring the accounts’ actions as well as strengthening their existing security.

Goner also advised investors that the company would never undertake surprise mints, a typical strategy used by attackers to draw in victims while delivering the proactive warning.

Yuga Labs’ NFT offerings’ popularity and consumer demand resulted in the unintentional emergence of ape-themed scams. Attackers gained access to Yuga Labs’ BAYC and OtherSide Discord groups on June 5 and stole over 145 Ether (ETH).

The attack was carried out via hacking into the Discord account of Boris Vagner, Yuga Labs’ community and social manager, according to blockchain detective OKHotshot.

After falling victim to a vulnerability in its market maker’s smart contract, the Optimism layer-2 scaling solution lost 20 million OP tokens.

One million tokens worth around $1.3 million were sold, and one million tokens worth approximately $730,000 were sent to Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum address on Optimism. The 18 million tokens that are left are inactive and can be sold or utilized to influence governance choices.

The Twitter staff took the warning seriously and began monitoring activity to ensure that the accounts were safe. There would be no surprise mints, Gorner warned the BAYC community repeatedly. One of the most prevalent ways for scammers to steal from consumers’ money is through phony mint news and phishing URLs embedded in the fake news.

BAYC & OtherSide Discords Breached; Estimated Loss Of $360K

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Some of NFT’s biggest names- Bored Ape Yacht Club or BAYC & OtherSide discords servers were compromised, leading to a loss of around 200 ETH or $360000 in total. Yuga Labs, the creator firm behind the projects confirmed the exploit via Twitter adding that it is actively investigating the incident.

It all started when the project’s community manager, Boris Vagner‘s Discord account got hacked. The bad actor took advantage of the breached profile and posted phishing links in both the official BAYC and its related metaverse project called Otherside’s Discord channels.

According to reports, the hacker managed to take away 32 NFTs including one Bored Ape, two Mutant Apes, and five Otherside Deeds.

Hackers have targeted Discord Inc. groups in order to get users to click on malicious links. Previously covered by TronWeekly, on May 25, 2020, a Moonbirds NFT owner lost 29 of these Ethereum-based tokens in phishing fraud.

The stolen NFTs were valued at roughly $1.5 million. But the most recent high-profile case of impersonation fraud has been that of Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, a digital artist and popular NFT developer whose Twitter account was hacked by scammers to post a phishing scam.

BAYC hack detailed analysis

Co-founder of Yuga Labs Gorden Goner tweeted that “We took accountability with our tweet from BAYC. We are directly working with those impacted.” He then blamed instant messaging platform Discord saying it was time for a “better platform that puts security first”.

In response, a user ask him to stop blaming Discord and accused the team of being complacent, as “this could have been prevented”.

Some vented out their frustration by calling the exploit “Ponzi of the century”.

One Twitter user wrote– ” Probably a rogue team member or a team member didn’t have 2FA [ Two-factor authentication] enabled and got phished or hacked individually. the entire team from mods and up should be required 2FA by default though, especially in the BAYC server.”

Another commented in the replies that 2FA can easily be bypassed and is somewhat pointless on Discord. That being said, one can check OxRebels’s post-mortem technical report detailing how the 2FA Discord Announcements Bot might help minimize the repeat of such attacks.

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BAYC Instagram Comes To A Halt After A $1M Exploit: More Details

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Bored Ape Yacht Club or BAYC came under attack by a malicious actor who stole NFTs worth millions of dollars after compromising the official Instagram account of the acclaimed NFT collection. Sources revealed that hacker/s employed a phishing link that transferred tokens out of users’ crypto wallets.

Disclosing via Twitter in the early hours of 25th April, the platform announced by saying, “The hacker posted a fraudulent link to a copycat of the BAYC website with a fake Airdrop, where users were prompted to sign a ‘safe transfer from’ transaction. This transferred their assets to the scammer’s wallet.”

A screenshot shared by one Twitter user depicted an OpenSea page of the hacker’s account receiving more than a dozen NFTs from the Bored Ape, Mutant Ape, and Bored Ape Kennel Club projects — all likely stolen from users who connected their wallets after clicking on the phishing link.

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As of now, the profile page tied to the hacker’s wallet address was no longer visible on OpenSea. Head of communications at OpenSea Allie Mack confirmed that the hacker’s account had been blacklisted from the platform.

BAYC Hack is more complicated than it seems

Due to the decentralized nature of NFT, the contents of the hacker’s wallet can still be viewed on other platforms like in Rarible, the wallet had 134 NFTs, among them four Bored Apes made by Yuga Labs, the creators of BAYC such as Mutant Apes and Bored Ape Kennel Club.

Still, it remains a mystery how the hacker was able to hijack the project’s Instagram account. As per a statement posted on Twitter, Yuga Labs said that two-factor authentication was active at the time of the attack and that the security of the Instagram account followed best practices.

Yuga Labs also said that the team was actively working to establish contact with affected users.

That said, it is generally advised that holders of NFT should never connect their wallets to an unknown or untrusted third party.

Seeing that the phishing link was sent via the official BAYC social media account, made the victims believe that it was legitimate and thus were tricked into clicking the fraudulent link,

BAYC Metaverse ‘Otherside’ set to debut on April 30

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Acclaimed NFT collection BAYC’s highly anticipated metaverse “Otherside” launched date has finally arrived. As per the announcement, the upcoming project is set to go live on 30 April at 12 pm ET. The platform has linked its Discord channel encouraging people to join and has raked in roughly 140k members as of now.

At the time of writing, 31,294 of them were trying to get into the Discord. Sources revealed a long waiting line for several hours, all attempting to clear the bot verification test and gain entry.

For the uninitiated, the Otherside was conceived by Yuga Labs, who happens to be the creators behind the popular BAYC collection. According to the team, the Otherside will be an open metaverse RPG compatible with all kinds of NFTs.

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There were widespread speculations in the NFT space since Yuga Labs dropped the teaser in March. The ad also took everyone by surprise as some felt there was more than met the eye.

Otherside’s Slick Commercial revealed several famous NFT characters

In the 1 and a half minute ad, aptly titled “See you on the other side”, a Bored Ape comes across a tempting drink. As he gulped down the bottle, the startled ape soon saw a whole new world unfolding before his eyes. Seconds later, bobbing along to an iconic rock song by “The Doors”, several well-known NFT projects popped up in the teaser.

This includes the famous Cool Cats, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, World of Women, CryptoPunks, and Meebits NFTs. One can’t help but speculate if these NFTs were in some kind of partnership deals with BAYC on the Otherside.

At present, there’s not much info in the official Discord channel about the metaverse drop. Also, there isn’t any official website yet. However, the team said it will disclose more details later this week.

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As per a leaked pitch deck last month, the BAYC creators will release 200k plots of virtual lands on the Otherside for sale. Eventually, these land plots form the essential parts of the meta RPG where each plot will come with its own unique attributes such as natural resources, artifacts, and rare characters.

Sources also revealed the price of each plot would start from 1 ETH. It needs to be seen whether the Otherside would match exactly like the one described in the pitch deck.

OpenSea in troubled waters; faces 3 lawsuits over stolen BAYC NFTs

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OpenSea’s trouble woes continued to pile up after a year rife with hacks and scams that have already played havoc on the world’s largest NFT platform. As per sources, the Nft marketplace is now facing three separate lawsuits from plaintiffs who lost access to their Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs.

Texas native Timmy McKimmy and Michael Valise of New York both claimed to have lost Bored Apes in a hack that exploited a known security vulnerability in OpenSea’s code. The third plaintiff Robert Armijo, of Nevada, said he lost his NFTs in a social engineering attack which he blamed was caused due to the platform’s negligence.

As per court filings, McKimmy also failed to get compensation for the lost assets despite numerous requests with the platform though OpenSea allegedly told him that it was “actively investigating” the issue.

OpenSea Has Prioritized Growth over Consumer Safety- Court filings

According to the court documents, Armijo suggested a certain website and the user sent him a link to it, claiming that they had already uploaded their NFTs. As he clicked the link, his wallet containing his two Mutant Apes and his Bored Ape, along with some cryptocurrency, was drained off.

Armijo then attempted to contact OpenSea to freeze his assets, But he reportedly encountered numerous obstructions. “Mr. Armijo tried to find a phone number to contact the customer service, but no such number exists,” read the court documents. He next went to OpenSea’s Discord server.”

There too, Armijo didn’t receive any responses. As this critical window of time closed, the plaintiff found his stolen Bored Ape was listed on OpenSea and sold off two hours after the hack.

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Armijo accused the platform’s delayed reply who took 4 hours to respond to Armijo’s help tickets and froze his Mutant Apes. But that could not do any good, as the hacker already listed the Mutant Apes on LooksRare, where they were sold almost immediately. Frustrated, Armijo is now suing LooksRare as well.

“OpenSea has prioritized growth over consumer safety and the security of consumer’s digital assets,” the complaint reads.

The complaint cited the example of an approval process that OpenSea used to have, which required that NFTs be verified before upload by their proper owner. The process was discontinued in March 2021, since then thefts became rampant, it alleged.

User s27 Lost His Bubble Gum BAYC NFT Worth $570,000 to a Scammer

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Unknown BAYC NFT owner “s27” recently lost around $570,000 in NFTs. This was after he swapped his BAYC NFT and two Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) tokens for counterfeit NFTs that were cleverly disguised as real.

A “bubble gum ape” was among the NFTs that went missing. The user claimed to have completed the swap via the “Swap.Kiwi” NFT exchange platform. It allows for direct NFT exchanges between collectors while lowering transaction fees.

Thanks to his Discord channel programmed to watch BAYC and MAYC listings that are at least 5% below their floor price in Ether, crypto enthusiast “quit” (@0xQuit on Twitter) detected the likely fraudulent transaction first.

s27 adds to the victim’s list of the latest BAYC scam

“The pings are rare, but when they happen it generally means one of two things: somebody is panic selling, or somebody is compromised. When I saw the notification for #1584, I instantly knew it was the latter.”

@0xQuit tweet

Quit found that not only did the deceived user transfer his expensive NFTs to a fraudster, but he was also the one who initiated the exchange, as he revealed in a Twitter thread.

Quit then tracked down the scammer’s NFTs, which s27 had gotten following the trade. They all seemed to be authentic BAYC tokens, but they weren’t.

Kiwi uses a “green checkmark” to ensure that tokens are genuine.

However, the way the checkmark appears on the UI can be readily faked using a basic image editor, which is precisely what the fraudster did.

The scammer essentially downloaded several “jpegs” displaying a few high-priced BAYC apes and applied a false watermark to make them look legitimate when posted on Swap. Kiwi.

Shortly after receiving them, the fraudster sold the BAYC and two MAYC NFTs for 98.85 ETH, 23 ETH, and 25.25 ETH, totaling $521,000. Quit said these postings were lower than their respective floor pricing, putting s27’s potential loss at $570,000.

Meanwhile, holders of NFTs appear to be becoming a prominent target for fraudsters of all kinds, who, in turn, continue to come up with increasingly imaginative strategies for their schemes.

BAYC NFT Stolen From Taiwanese Singer Jay Chou Has Been Sold for 164 ETH

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On the NFT trade platform LooksRare, a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT reportedly stolen from Taiwanese musician Jay Chou sold for 164 ETH ($570,000).

According to the singer, the NFT, BAYC #3738, was taken along with numerous other tokens in a phishing assault.

The attack happened simultaneously as a hack on the official BAYC discord. However, it’s unclear if the two are connected. A Mutant Ape NFT was stolen during the BAYC raid.

According to on-chain statistics, the NFT has already passed through many hands since its theft on Friday. Its most recent selling was for a profit of approximately 50% above BAYC’s floor price.

The journey of the lost BAYC APE

The ape in dispute had gone through at least two purchasers in the hours following its abduction, according to a comprehensive study by blockchain security firm Beosin.

The first transaction involved 124 wrapped ETH (WETH), while the second involved 155 WETH.

The hacker utilized tornado cash, a prominent crypto mixer, to make the laundered ETH untraceable.

The LooksRare account that presently owns the token looks like a whale with an extensive collection of Bored Apes. It wasn’t apparent whether those Apes were also stolen items.

Thefts of Bored Apes are not uncommon since thefts have been documented since the NFT boom in 2021.

A never-ending spree of crypto hacks

A hacker drained a liquidity pool belonging to the popular play-to-earn game (P2E) Axie Infinity (AXS) last week, stealing around $600 million worth of tokens in the largest crypto heist.

On Monday, the hacker was seen transferring the majority of the stolen tokens into Tornado Cash, where they are likely to be untraceable.

Nonetheless, given the attack’s high visibility and the hacker’s use of private, centralized exchanges to fund it, their identity may be traceable in the near future.

The attacks highlight that no matter how unhackable you think anything is, the hackers find their way around everything. The best way is to have self custody of your own assets. The freedom of digital assets comes with great responsibility. It’s best to safeguard and secure it rather than weeping later once it’s lost.

Vitalik Buterin Equates BAYC to Gambling in Time Magazine Interview

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Time magazine’s latest cover featured Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin as the most influential person in crypto. The publication termed Buterin as the “The Prince of Crypto”, where he gave his insights on the blockchain and the broader crypto industry. Throughout the 80 long minute interview, Buterin delved into how crypto can go wrong if not properly implemented.

He cautioned against overconfident investors, the exorbitant transaction fees, and the brazen displays of wealth that have now come to be associated with crypto. Turning his attention to one of the most talked-about nft projects – the BAYC, the Russian Canadian programmer equated them to gambling which he claims, has reduced to a mere “status symbol for millionaires.”

“The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling,” he says, “There definitely are lots of people that are just buying yachts and Lambos.”

One of the major turning points for the ecosystem has been during the infamous 2016 DAO Hack that led to the creation of a hard fork to fix the project’s vulnerability. The fork was approved after receiving an overwhelming vote from the community, which in turn helped towards Ether’s price recovery. To Buterin, the DAO hack epitomized the promise of a decentralized approach to governance, the article read.

Vitalik Buterin fears Ethereum’s transformative power is at stake

Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all kinds of social projects. Most importantly, he wants the platform to be a force to reckon against authoritarian governments and centralized institutions. Fearing the “transformative power'” of Ethereum is at risk, he admitted to being hesitant to take on a bigger public role.

But Buterin stressed being vocal is of utmost importance, adding “If we don’t exercise our voice, the only things that get built are the things that are immediately profitable. And those are often far from what’s actually the best for the world.”

The EF, better known as Ethereum Foundation is a nonprofit established to safeguard Ethereum’s infrastructure and fund research and development projects. As per sources, its research team is currently working on two key technical updates. One of them is the “merge” which transforms the blockchain from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.

At ETHDenver, the EF researcher Danny Ryan announced that the merge would happen within the next six months, unless “something insanely catastrophic” happens.

BAYC creator Yuga Labs obtained the rights of CryptoPunks for an undisclosed amount

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Bored Apes Yacht Club’s parent firm Yuga Labs announced on 11 March that they have acquired the rights to the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections from creator Larva Labs, according to the source. However, the terms of the deal were not specified.

That being said, Bored Apes and CryptoPunks are the two most valuable NFT collections by market cap and hold a combined valuation of more than $3 billion at current prices.

CryptoPunks and Meebits NFTs are owned by community members, but the intellectual property rights of the characters had long been held by the projects’ creators drawing criticisms. With this announcement, Yuga Labs signaled that things are about to change. They won’t be transferring the full copyright to the individual holders but have taken a step further than Larva Labs and something owners had long desired.

A tweet from the Yuga Labs Twitter account read, “We’ve long admired CryptoPunks, and the work of the project’s founders, Matt & John. They’ve pushed NFTs and the broader crypto world forward, and we’re honored to carry the brands they’ve built into the future we’re building at Yuga.”

The CryptoPunks project was conceived in 2017 by Larva Labs with 10,000 NFTs and is generally seen as one of the earliest and most influential NFT projects to date. In May of 2021, the creators released a follow-up project called Meebits, netting tens of millions of dollars in primary sales within hours of launch.

Yuga Labs on its “aggressive” acquisition

Yuga Labs has been actively building the community surrounding the BAYC project. A blog post from the Larva Labs founders quoted, “This is, however, not an acquisition of Larva Lab. As for what’s next for us, we never talk about that until it’s ready, but in general, we’re excited to get back to what we do best, which is working on weird new stuff.”

Earlier in February, Yuga Labs CEO Nicole Muniz criticized Buzzfeed for revealing the identities of the Bored Ape founders. TronWeekly had previously reported on the news that created quite a furor in the community with some accusing Buzzfeed’s article as “doxxing” rather than appropriate journalistic practice.

NFT craze: Justin Bieber is now the proud owner of a $1.3 million BAYC

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A non-fungible token [NFT] from the Bored Ape Yacht Club [BAYC] collection was bought by award-winning pop singer Justin Bieber for an eye-popping $1.3 million worth of Ethereum [ETH] on the world’s biggest nft marketplace OpenSea. The popular singer whose songs smashed records recently achieved another milestone.

A few days ago, Bieber became the first artist to score ten tracks with over a billion streams on leading streaming platform Spotify. But he isn’t the only one to join the famous Bored Ape Yacht Club. Last December, rapper Eminem purchased a BAYC NFT for $462,000, joining the list of growing celebrities such as Steph Curry and Post Malone.

Having said that some Twitter users felt that the digital token market had a significantly lower floor price since it has no rare traits, which is why they argue that the “Stay” hitmaker got “finessed.” On the other hand, some celebrities who are too jumping to test the water end up being a subject of mockery.   

For instance, earlier this week, a deeply awkward clip of socialite Paris Hilton and talk show host Jimmy Fallon showing off their NFTs in the dullest way possible went viral and were trolled on Twitter. Even cryptocurrency proponents couldn’t help but find the segment extremely obnoxious.

Yuga Labs, the firm behind the BAYC collection, is reportedly eyeing a $5 billion valuation, which would make it one of the biggest web3 brands.

Major companies such as Walmart and YouTube are also preparing to jump into the NFT craze, but there are also some big-name skeptics of the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk

Celebrities join the NFT mania

The biggest A-list celebrities in town now own a Bored Ape. Popular show host Jimmy Fallon too became the owner of one ape and rapper Post Malone dropped over $700,000 to buy two of them. Soccer star Neymar recently dropped another Ape to his collection, one that is actually pink in color! It’s been reported, Neymar’s collection is worth well over a million dollars.

Openseas, the trading platform where most purchases are held, reveals that sales of NFT’s have surpassed $4 Billion in trading volume in the month of December.