Security News > 2022 > April > Star loses $500,000 NFT after crooks exploit Rarible market

Miscreants exploited a now-fixed design flaw in the Rarible NFT marketplace to steal a non-fungible token from Taiwanese singer and actor Jay Chou and sell it for about $500,000.

Attackers tend to use these types of transactions in phishing attacks, but they become more dangerous when an NFT marketplace is involved.

In February, 17 users of the OpenSea NFT marketplace were scammed out of $1.7 million in a phishing attack that allowed hackers to steal hundreds of NFTs. Another 15 users interacted with the attackers but didn't lose tokens.

Nick Donarski, founder and CTO of blockchain company ORE System, wrote in a column last month about the security issues surrounding NFTs. "Each NFT comes integrated with a unique signature to verify its authenticity and uniqueness, as well as its chain of ownership, meaning that these assets are noninterchangeable," Donarski wrote.

NFT creators also can earn up to 50 percent in royalties when someone resells their NFT on the secondary market.

The popularity of NFTs and cryptocurrency is being driven by non-technical people, "So even if the underlying technology is reasonably secure, threat actors can still fall back to phishing or social engineering to exploit their victims," Mike Parkin, senior technical engineer at Vulcan Cyber, told The Register.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/04/15/rarible-flaw-nft/