DeFiance Capital Founder Victim of a $1.6M Phishing Hack
DeFiance Capital founder "Arthur_0x" has suffered an exploit of his hot wallet worth over $1.6 million in NFTs and cryptocurrency.
As Arthur states on his Twitter profile, it appears that he has been the victim of a socially engineered spear phishing e-mail attack. He downloaded a malicious PDF file that looked legitimate at first glance, however, upon opening the file, it infected his PC/Browser.
Found out the likely root cause for the exploit, it's a targeted social engineering attack. Received a spear-phishing email that really seems to be sent by one of our portco with content that seems like general industry-relevant content.
— Arthur 🌔⛩️🦔👻 (@Arthur_0x) March 22, 2022
They are likely targeting all crypto peep pic.twitter.com/SegYBcoLX2
What is a Phishing attack?
The Damage
Allegedly, Arthur lost 78 unique NFTs from five different collections, mostly "Azukis." Furthermore, he lost 68 wrapped Ether (wETH), 4,349 staked DYDX (stkDYDX) and 1,578 LooksRare (LOOKS) tokens.
The hacker began moving assets at about 12:30 am UTC, then promptly put all the NFTs up for bid on the OpenSea NFT marketplace. The hacker’s wallet held 545 ETH, worth about $1.6 million.
Unfortunately all NFTs have already been listed on Opensea and some of them have already been sold. OpenSea had already flagged a handful of the NFTs listed on the marketplace as “suspicious activity”.
He also believes that the "Lazarus Group" is behind this attack.
Have strong evidence to believe this is the same group of hackers that exploited BZX, Hugh, MGNR and myself.
— Arthur 🌔⛩️🦔👻 (@Arthur_0x) March 22, 2022
The infamous Lazarus group.
Who is Lazarus?
Arthur ended up posting "you mess with the wrong person". Let's see what will be his next steps to counter this incident.
