10th September 2023 > > Warning.
- Mark Timmis
- Sep 10, 2023
- 2 min read
tl;dr
Another salutary lesson to consider over Sunday lunch.
Market Snap
Market Wrap
Can anyone remember the last time ETH moved in price?
Occasional Series – Who knew that the Grauniad is a sensible newspaper with grown-up ideas?
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Another word of warning
Crypto god Vitalik Buterin had his X account hacked. The hackers posted this:
Those who tried to mint the free NFT found that their wallets could be drained. As of now, 51 NFTs have been stolen (including some Punks), 224 ETH valued at $365k, and other cryptos. You can see right here:
So, how does this even happen? The link includes malicious code giving the perpetrator rights to transfer assets from a MetaMask wallet to his own. This isn’t even a particularly sophisticated attack. Frankly it is dead easy to ensure you will never fall victim to this type of scam by taking some very simple precautionary measures.
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The most obvious course of action is to use a burner wallet with a minimum amount of cryptos whenever interacting with unknown or untrusted sites. There is really no need to store valuable CryptoPunks in a hot wallet, used to interact with DeFi protocols and Web3.
Cold wallets should always be secured with hardware, preferably Ledger Nano X. This ensures that you must go through an extra step before interacting with the decentralised world. Perhaps that delay is enough to make you stop and think.
Use the Fire add-on which identifies any malicious code and forewarns you:
Finally, and most important of all, don’t just merrily click away assuming everything will be alright:
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Both Punks have now been moved again away from the scammer, one at zero price and one at 155 ETH ($250k) which has since been transferred again.
The current owner of that second Punk (https://etherscan.io/address/0x5F896f9464EfD90aFcece73ef0ab4Ee63536c184) appears to be a trader of NFTs in size. It won’t be difficult to track him or her down, though I should point out that they were almost certainly a buyer of good faith.
Now that the scam is widely known about, like all stolen artwork, its secondary value is now minimal, as will be the case for all the other stolen NFTs. Which is sort of the point when non-fungibility comes into play.
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