Discord hack costs NFT traders $150,000 on Fractal Marketplace

The new marketplace for game-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Fractal, recently experienced a discord scam costing their users to lose out on roughly $150,000. Last Tuesday, a link was sent to the project’s official Discord channel, and those who followed it reported that their holdings of Solana (SOL) were transferred to an unknown account.

Fractal is a startup project by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan. It is centered around the buying and selling of NFTs representing in-game assets. The project was launched earlier this month and has quickly gained traction as over 100,000 users flooded the Discord channels.

News of the scam reached Twitter as Kan informed followers that the Discord had been hacked. The cyberattack took advantage of those hoping to mint NFTs, rather than buying them on a secondary market at a later date. Fractal’s sudden rise in the industry made them a prime target for a cyberattack as demand for mints and time pressure often lead to people making rash decisions.

Although the cryptography behind cryptocurrencies and NFTs is highly complex and secure, the sheer amount of sites and applications make them vulnerable to attacks. Fractal’s official Twitter suggested that the scam message was posted on Discord vis a webhook. Webhooks are a feature of web application design that lets an app listen for a message sent to a specific URL and trigger an event in response.

If a webhook is not secured with added security measures, almost anyone with the URL can post to the channel.

Following the hack, officials at Fractal assured that those who lost money would be compensated. In a post, the marketplace announced that:

“If something doesn’t feel right in crypto, please don’t proceed, even if at first it looks legitimate. We must use our best judgment as there’s no ‘undo button’ in crypto.”

Source: The Verge