The official Instagram account of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) gets hacked resulting in almost 91 NFTs to be stolen from multiple users.
The BAYC team confirmed the incident on Twitter, alleging that a hacker posted a fraudulent link on their official Instagram page claiming that Bored Ape developer Yuga Labs is airdropping free land for its much anticipated Otherside project.
According to the hacker’s post the airdrop required users to sign a transaction called “safeTransferFrom”, which sent NFTs to the hacker’s wallet. At the time of writing, the hacker’’s address had gathered 91 NFTs in total, worth an estimated $2.8M. This includes 4 BAYC, 7 MAYC, 3 BAKC, 1 CloneX among others.
At the time of publication, the profile page linked to the hacker’s wallet address is no longer viewable on OpenSea. The hacker’s account was banned on OpenSea, according to Allie Mack, the company’s head of communications.
It’s unclear how the hacker gained access to the project’s Instagram account, and the team is looking into the case. According to Yuga Labs, two-factor authentication was activated at the time of the hack, and the Instagram account’s security followed best practices.
“We will also NEVER announce mints on the BAYC or Otherside Instagram accounts first, ever. Only obtain information from our official Twitter accounts: @BoredApeYC, @yugalabs, and @OthersideMeta. These will be crossposted on the #announcement channel of BAYC Discord,” the team tweeted.
Yuga Labs has since then regained control of the Instagram account, and are now urging users who are affected by the hack to contact the support team.
According to Twitter user zachxbt, the majority of the funds were sent to crypto exchange Kucoin and the remaining to Binance. He assumes the accounts have stolen KYC.
BAYC has continuously been vulnerable to hack attacks as just on the April Fools day its official Discord channel got compromised resulting in MAYC NFT #8662 to be stolen. And now with their Instagram account also getting attacked it’s really time for the team to tighten their security as the Otherside Metaverse project launch is nearing.
