BAYC Faces Second Phishing Attack in a Month Following Instagram Hack

Key Insights:

• The Bored ape Yacht Club confirmed the hack of their Instagram account yesterday.
• Multiple users lost their Apes, Mutants, and Kernel NFTs.
• ApeCoin rallied by 15% yesterday, followed by a 9% fall today.

Problems for the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) continue to increase, with the NFT collection facing another hack yesterday.

However, unlike traditional hacks and exploits, the NFT holders’ accounts or the transactions weren’t exploited instead, a simple phishing trick was used to execute the theft.

BAYC Gets Hacked… AGAIN!

This is the second time BAYC is facing such a situation after its Discord account was compromised earlier this month, on April 1.

As reported by FXEmpire, the General Chat channel of the server was flooded with messages directing users to mint NFTs. And those who did ended up losing their NFTs.

This time around, the hackers employed a similar technique, albeit with BAYC’s Instagram account. Confirming the hack, BAYC clarified,

“The hacker posted a fraudulent link to a copycat of the BAYC website with a fake Airdrop, where users were prompted to sign a ‘safeTransferFrom’ transaction. This transferred their assets to the scammer’s wallet.”

The team confirmed that two-factor authorization for the account was enabled, and soon after, the account’s control was retrieved as BAYC is now investigating how the account was hacked.

Adding to the same, the founder of the BAYC NFT collection Greg Solano confirmed that 4 Apes, 6 Mutants, 3 Kennels, and some other assorted valuable NFTs were stolen by the hacker during the hack. 

APE Goes Crazy

Whether it was the effect of the bullishness surrounding Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition that triggered a market-wide rally or the confirmation of the hack is unclear.

Still, ApeCoin managed to paint a green candle yesterday, pushing its price up by 15.22% to close at $19.38. 

However, the following day on April 26, APE ended up declining by 8.42%, correcting the sudden rise from the day before.

Fortunately, the hack did not do any significant damage to either the investors or NFT holders, as that would’ve placed the BAYC team’s security procedures at the crosshair.

As it is, the DeFi space is questioned for its security, and incidents as such only flame the fire further, which must be avoided as much as possible.