Beeple’s Twitter Hacked in Phishing Scam
2 min read
The Twitter account of popular graphic artist focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, was hacked.
The attackers then started to launch a phishing attack, where a malicious actor impersonates a legitimate organization to obtain sensitive data from victims, such as access to digital asset wallets.
The attackers used the artist’s account, which has over 670,000 followers, to share a fake link. The address directed users to a website for an alleged Beeple collaboration with Louis Vuitton. However, when clicking on the site, the user had their cryptocurrencies stolen.
After recovering his account, Beeple tweeted:
Stay safe out there, anything too good to be true IS A FUCKING SCAM.
— beeple (@beeple) May 22, 2022
And as side note, there will never be a SURPRISE MINT I mention one time in one place starting at 6am Sunday morning. 🤦♂️
Beeple is a 3D artist famous in the NFT world for selling a work at a record $69 million auction.
About the phishing attack
According to Harry Denley, security expert at the MetaMask cryptocurrency wallet, once users connected their ETH wallets, their assets were automatically drained. Regarding the fraudulent domain, Denley provided the following details:
How do we know it's a scam? We have some good indicators.
— harry.eth 🦊💙 (whg.eth) (@sniko_) May 22, 2022
On 2022-05-15, the domain was pointed to 45.61.136.112 which hosts malicious scam domains.
As of 2022-05-22, the domain has switched to 64.190.113.10 which seems to be a dedicated host (as of now) pic.twitter.com/Qdl2Ke4U61
With the phishing attack, the attackers managed to steal more than 35 ETH in user funds. That is, more than $71,000 considering the current price of Ether ($2,050).
Phishing Scams in the Crypto Market
Fraudulent phishing campaigns are common in the cryptocurrency world, especially on Twitter.
In March of this year 35 NFTs were stolen in a phishing attack. Among the stolen NFTs were five from the popular Bored Ape, Mutant Ape or Bored Ape Kennel Club collections.
Meanwhile, in the month of April, users of Terra (LUNA) also They lost $4.3 million in another phishing scam. Most of this attack was from Google phishing ads related to the DeFi Anchor protocol.
In the same month, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky he said have identified more than 100,000 phishing attacks on cryptocurrency wallets in the first two months of the year alone.
By way of comparison, in the entire year of 2021 there were about 60 thousand attacks of the type involving digital currencies. According to Kaspersky experts, many scams target MetaMask digital wallet customers.
