'Blockchain City' CityDAO Falls Victim to $95K Hack via Discord

CityDAO, the experiment into decentralized land ownership, has fallen victim to a $95,000 hack by fraudsters on gaming instant messaging site Discord.

An attacker hacked one of the project's admin accounts on Discord, according to the group's Twitter account.
"EMERGENCY NOTICE. A CityDAO Discord admin account has been hacked. THERE IS NO LAND DROP. DO NOT CONNECT YOUR WALLET," CityDAO tweeted Monday.
CityDAO's founders purchased 40 acres of land in Wyoming in November with the intention of building a "blockchain city."
The project's aim is to build a city with decentralized governance, where "citizens" purchase land in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). CityDAO uses Discord to issue alerts known as "land drops" when there are opportunities to purchase said NFTs.
The attacker issued a fake land drop from the admin's compromised account, pocketing 29.67 ETH ($95,000) in the process.
The affected admin, "Lyons800", subsequently tweeted that the attack was "a ridiculous security breach from Discord."
This marks a second large hack via Discord in less than a month. On Dec. 21, Justin Kan's NFT platform Fractal suffered a breach in which someone hacked the project's account to issue a fraudulent link to users promoting a new NFT, making off with around $150,000.

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Jamie Crawley

Jamie Crawley is a CoinDesk news reporter based in London.

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