Not an April Fools Joke! BAYC Confirms Its Discord Was Compromised

Key Insights:

• NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club discovered its Discord server’s hack.
• During the hack, the attacker managed to steal a MAYC NFT worth $69.5k.
• The reason behind the hack is said to be the Ticker Tool.

As the day of the pranks dawned upon the world, the first suspicion of the same came from early reports of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s (BAYC) Discord server’s hack on Twitter.

However, it turns out that it was not a prank after all since the hack led to a much more severe mishap than a couple of spam messages.

BAYC Discord Hacked

In a tweet, the BAYC team confirmed that their Discord server’s compromise was true, and during the time that it was compromised, the hackers even managed to steal a valuable Mutant ApeYacht Club (MAYC) NFT.

Although the NFTs in the MAYC collection has a floor price of 23.6 ETH ($77.4k), the NFT 8862 had a lower bid to its name of about 21.3 ETH ($69.5k). While reports began appearing early on, it was only after this theft that people started taking this seriously. 

BAYC Discord hacked pic.twitter.com/xSQh7YtC8N

— 0xGav.eth (@0xGav) April 1, 2022

But BAYC wasn’t the only one to experience this, as another NFT Collection Doodles also observed a similar hack with its Discord server. Over 1,000 spambots infiltrated the ‘General chat’ channel of the server and flooded it with messages directing users to mint NFTs. 

However, this wasn’t the first instance of a compromise for Doodles. Not too long ago, on February 27, the collection’s Discord server was penetrated by a hacked bot. But the team managed to regain control and secure the server pretty quickly.

The Cause of the Hack

Although official confirmation is yet to be received from the BAYC team, a Twitter user, Serpent, claims to have found the cause of the hack. According to Serpent, the Ticket Tool was the real source of the hack. 

I have received inside information from one of the hackers.

🚨 THE OFFICIAL CAPTCHA BOT IS HACKED, REMOVE IT FROM YOUR SERVER 🚨

BAYC & Doodles have already been hacked within the last 30 minutes but MANY MORE SERVERS WILL BE HACKED. pic.twitter.com/eEVjsxCyre

— Serpent (@SerpentAU) April 1, 2022

The user also stated that according to the inside information received from the hackers, the official Captcha Bot was also hacked and that the source code had been stolen.

As of the time of writing, BAYC has only issued a precautionary message for all its Discord members to be wary about the messages that appear on their Discord server by tweeting,

“STAY SAFE. Do not mint anything from any Discord right now. A webhook in our Discord was briefly compromised. We caught it immediately but please know: we are not doing any April Fools stealth mints / airdrops etc. Other Discords are also being attacked right now.”