Bored Ape Yacht Club Confirms Instagram Account Was Hacked, Here Is How It Happened

Yuga Labs, the team behind the popular non-fungible token (NFT) collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), lost access to their Instagram account. The team confirmed that their profile on this social media was hacked which allow the attackers to post links to a copycat website which led to fake Airdrops.

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Users were lured to the fake websites, trusting that the announcement was official. Later, they were asked to sign a “safeTransferFrom” transaction, as the team behind Bored Ape Yacht Club said, which allowed the attackers to steal their digital assets. The team behind the project stated:

Immediately upon discovering the hack, we alerted our community, removed links to the compromised IG account from our platforms, and attempted to recover the account.

The account was hacked even with extra security measures online, BAYC confirmed, such as two-factor authentication. In addition, they claimed that the team followed good security practices.

Despite these claims, the account was hacked leading to important losses for several users. One of the project’s co-founders said that the hack resulted in the 4 Apes, 6 mutants, 3 Kennels, and the loss of other digital assets.

In that sense, the BAYC co-founder committed to the community to post further details on the attack and to stay in touch with the victims. At the time of writing, Bored Ape Yacht Club was able to regain control of its account with support from the social media platform. They added the following:

If you were affected by the hack or have information that might be helpful, reach out to [email protected]. You need to contact us first – anybody contacting you first is not us. We will NOT reach out to anyone over email first, and we will NEVER ask for your seed phrase.

Bored Ape Yacht Club Affected By A Wider Attack On Crypto?

Further data provided by a pseudonym user claims the attackers attempted to steal as much as 2,000 ETH in a matter of minutes. The user claims that a single item in the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection is valued at a minimum of 150 ETH.

These users show screenshots from the fake airdrop which promised participants, required to connect their MetaMask wallets, a portion of a fake token called LAND. As seen below, the attackers went the extra mile to make the announcement look legitimate.

The team at Yuga Labs concluded with the following warning for the community:

We will also NEVER announce mints on the BAYC or Otherside Instagram accounts first, ever. Only obtain information from our official twitter accounts: Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC), Yuga Labs (@yugalabs), and @OthersideMeta. These will be crossposted on the announcement channel of BAYC Discord.

As Bitcoinist reported, there is an ongoing attack on the entire crypto industry. Bad actors linked to rogue nations have been targeting DeFi and NFT projects. Over the past months, they have managed to steal millions from these projects.

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At the time of writing, Ethereum (ETH) trades at $3,000 with a 2.80% profit on the 4-hour chart.