A co-founder of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection faced a backlash for blaming the Discord messaging platform after ETH 200 (USD 378,000) worth of digital assets were snatched in an exploit.
On Saturday, Gordon Goner wrote on Twitter that Discord “isn’t working for Web3 communities” after the project’s Discord server was hacked. “We need a better platform that puts security first,” he added.
isnt it on your team not on discord to get this figured out lol, kind of weird to only blame discord while bayc seems to be a biweekly hack target at this point while other projects dont have the same issues
— satsdart 🔺 (@satsdart) June 4, 2022
However, some observers were quick to lash out at Goner for blaming the instant messaging social media platform.
“Don’t blame Discord for users getting socially engineered, having [direct messages] open and clicking phishing links,” said pseudonymous NFT analyst OKHotshot. “Use the tool correctly first before blaming it.”
People are definitely responsible for there own wallet. In the case it’s the Founders/Team being negligent after being in the space for over a year.
— Nonce(0) (@Nonce0) June 4, 2022
Discord security developer Captain Plantain also said phishing attacks will happen no matter what platform you choose, suggesting that the team should take the time and set up a “multilayer security” in order to prevent such incidents from happening again in the future.
Was just thinking this. So far every mistake BAYC has made has been somebody else’s fault, according to the team
— Yoms (🫡,🫡) (@mr52pickup) June 4, 2022
Nevertheless, the hack took place after attackers managed to post phishing links in both the official BAYC and its related metaverse project called Otherside’s Discord channels after compromising the account of Boris Vagner, the project’s community manager.
Yuga Labs, the company behind BAYC, later confirmed the exploit, saying that around ETH 200 “worth of NFTs appear to have been impacted.”
Notably, this is at least the third time a bad actor has been able to compromise the social accounts of Bored Ape to steal users’ funds over the past two months.
In early April, the team announced that a “webhook in our Discord” was compromised, asking users not to mint anything. On April 25, the project’s Instagram account and Discord server were once again hacked.
Source: Cryptonews
