Why You Need to Migrate Your Active Listings
OpenSea is upgrading its smart contract in an effort to eliminate inactive listings from its platform. As you may be aware, the computing requirements of cryptocurrencies and NFTs can be quite demanding. Eliminating inactive listings helps OpenSea lower operating costs, so this move shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.
OpenSea has also stated that this new upgrade will allow them to offer new safety features in the future – although they did not go into specifics. The consequences for failing to do this are apparently quite mild. According to OpenSea, your outstanding listings will simply expire, at which point you can re–list them.
What Does This Have to Do With OpenSea’s CyberSecurity Concerns?
Unfortunately, hackers took advantage of the planned upgrade and prepared a fake website, along with phishing emails. As soon as the upgrade began, these emails circulated, and users mistakenly migrated their NFTs using this fake website. This resulted in $2 million worth of NFTs being stolen.
At first, it was rumored that OpenSea’s official NFT marketplace had been hacked, although it was later confirmed that this was actually a phishing attack. In other words, the OpenSea platform itself was not compromised.
In total, approximately 32 users had their NFTs stolen. The attacker immediately sold some of the NFTs, but his wallet still contained about $1.7 million worth of them, according to the most recent reports.
Vulnerabilities Exposed?
On the one hand, there’s really nothing OpenSea could have done about this issue. Since the attacks were made from a separate website, the company’s cybersecurity defenses were completely bypassed. It remains to be seen how the attackers managed to find email addresses associated with OpenSea users, but this could have been done without any data leak.
On the other hand, this attack exposes vulnerabilities that are often dismissed in the crypto world. NFTs and cryptocurrencies are usually hailed as being completely secure, but the same old phishing attacks are just as effective as they were a decade ago. A blockchain can be incredibly secure, but human users can easily be tricked. If hackers can convince people to willingly give up their access codes, there’s no need to bypass OpenSea’s security systems.
Hopefully, OpenSea’s latest upgrades bolster its defenses even further, but they can’t really do much for the unlucky few who had their NFTs stolen.
