Web3 Security firm TRM Labs has said that attacks carried out on NFT projects implemented through their Discord channels have risen significantly. Most of these attacks are, reportedly, associated with a “wider group” of hackers.
In the last two months, over 100 reports of Discord channel hacks have been filed with Chainabuse, a community-led scam reporting platform operated by TRM Labs. Worryingly, in May alone the losses were reported to have been worth more than $22 million.
10 similar attacks were witnessed on 4th June. The report stated that in June there was a hike of 55% in NFT-based attacks compared to May.
TRM Labs stated that the tactics used to scam Discord users in most hacks are similar and utilise “sophisticated social engineering, such as phishing and fraudulent accounts pretending to be an administrator” or exploitation of bot vulnerabilities, followed by tweaking “administrator settings to ban Discord moderators from interfering with the hackers’ operations.”
The report also said: “A review of more than 15 notable Discord compromises targeting NFT servers and analysis of on-chain and off-chain data by TRM investigators suggest that dozens of these recent account compromises are likely related. Some of the linked compromises include well-known NFT Discord project accounts such as BAYC, Bubbleworld, Parallel, Lacoste, Tasties, Anata, and a dozen others.”
Chris Janczewski, head of global investigations at TRM Labs, said: “It isn’t necessarily that Discord in and of itself has a weakness, but it just makes it a very target-rich environment. If you’re looking for people that own NFTs, you go to a place where they’re all hanging out, and you have a point to be able to make [contact] with them.”
