NFTs worth US$1.7 million have been stolen from DeFiance Capital founder
A hacker has stolen US$1.7 million worth of NFTs from the founder of DeFiance Capital, Arthur Cheong. The NFTs were taken from a hot wallet, which Cheong confirmed via Twitter.
PeckShield, a blockchain security company, believes 59 NFTs were stolen, including 5 CloneX, 17 Azuki, 2 Hedgies and 33 Second Shelf tokens. Also taken by the bad actor were wrapped ether, Lido DAO Token, LooksRare and DYDX. The estimated total value of these tokens is US$1.7 million.
The hacker has attempted to sell the NFTs via marketplaces such as OpenSea. Some Azuki and CloneX tokens have already successfully been traded at the time of writing. Cheong says they were “pretty careful”, using a hardware wallet until recently when they moved to a hot wallet on a mobile device.
The DeFiance founder says that the exploit was likely caused by a spear-phishing email that deployed malware on their device. According to Cheong, the email with a PDF attachment was not marked as malicious by antivirus software and came from a seemingly legitimate source.
Cheong suspects that the Lazurus Group is behind the attack, which is also believed to have attacked AstraZeneca in late 2020. They also think that the hacker is targeting people in the broader cryptocurrency industry with the attack, warning that the bad actor could still be active.
