The developers of Bored Ape Yacht Club announced on Monday that hackers had infiltrated the official Instagram page of the popular NFT collection, sharing with followers of the project links that led to a fake Airdrop account.
Later, cryptocurrency users connected their MetaMask wallets to this fake website had Ape's NFT stolen. It appears that the attack was planned on the one-year anniversary of the launch of the BAYC collection, which increased the credibility of the fake link.
Unconfirmed reports on social media said that nearly 100 NFT's had been stolen in the fake attack. Based on data from CoinGecko, the floor price of each BAYC NFT is about 139 Ether (ETH), or $400,726. So if these reports are accurate, the attack has caused losses of more than $40 million. However, these numbers are also only the lowest calculations because they are based on floor prices.
🚨There is no mint going on today. It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click links, or link your wallet to anything.
— Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC) April 25, 2022
As of now, how the hackers gained access to BAYC's official Instagram account is unclear. Many social media users point to the importance of the two-factor authentication process as an effective barrier against fake logins. However, many people say that such methods are not completely guaranteed and can actually create a vulnerability when changing sim cards.
BAYC has become the most beloved NFT collection of all time in the cryptocurrency sector, generating more than $1 billion in revenue by 2021. The supply of this collection is limited to only 10,000 NFT. More than 38,748 ETH of Apes value have been traded on OpenSea over the past 30 days.
