OpenSea Says Phishing Attack Impacted 17 Users

The attack also no longer appears to be active because there has been no activity on the malicious contract for over 15 hours.

AccessTimeIconFeb 21, 2022 at 12:10 p.m. UTC
Updated May 11, 2023 at 7:14 p.m. UTC
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Non-fungible tokens (NFT) marketplace OpenSea said 17 users were impacted by the Sunday's phishing attack instead of the 32 users that was reported earlier.

  • The phishing attack was targeting smart contracts on OpenSea's platform.
  • "Our original count included anyone who had interacted with the attacker, rather than those who were victims of the phishing attack," the marketplace tweeted on Monday.
  • The attack also no longer appears to be active, as there has been no activity on the malicious contract for over 15 hours, the company said.
  • OpenSea is still yet to determine the exact source of the phishing attack first detected in the early hours of Sunday morning, following rumours circulating of an exploit of smart contracts on the platform.
  • CEO Devin Finzer subsequently tweeted that 32 users had "signed a malicious payload from an attacker, and some of their NFTs were stolen."
  • Blockchain security company PeckShield said that the exploit was "most likely phishing", whereby users authorized the migration of their NFTs to a new smart contract allowing them to be stolen. NFTs are digital assets on a blockchain that represent ownership of virtual or physical items.
  • OpenSea is among the most prominent platforms in the NFT world, with a recent $300 million investment round valuing it at $13.3 billion. It has seen $3.77 billion of trading volume in the last 30 days, according to data from DappRadar.

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Jamie Crawley

Jamie Crawley is a CoinDesk news reporter based in London.


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