Beeple Under Attack

Earlier this week, the 10KTF Discord server was compromised by a hacker. The project, which is associated with Beeple, focuses on a shop in New Tokyo run by one Wagmi-san. The hacker was able to gain control of a bot to release multiple messages that impersonated the 10KTF News Bot, attempting to get server members to mint a supposed unreleased NFT. This link led to a site where people were able to mint a fake NFT. Fortunately, the scam only took off with the ETH sent to mint the fake NFTs and did not compromise any user’s wallet. 

The 10KFT team was quick to respond, shutting down the server in an attempt to regain control. Since the attack, the 10KTF team has set up a support ticketing system where members can report any money lost and tips about the hack. The creators have also said they will reimburse any member that was affected by the hack: 

“We had a hacker hit our 10KTF discord server today (to hacker: go fuck yourself you POS). The team shut the server down and found the source and took care of it. The hacker did end up getting a few of our community members and a few folks trying to mint and join up with us, we assume. Shopkeepers said they will take care of anyone who took losses as a result of the hack. (Super rad, thank you all).” 

It is still unclear who the hacker is and how they were able to compromise the server. There is an ongoing investigation by the 10KTF Discord team. 

Just a day after the 10KTF Discord was compromised, the Beeple Collectors Discord suffered a similar attack. The attackers were able to gain access to an admin account named “Multi” and the Beeple Announcements Bot to release various malicious messages. The most concerning  feature of this hack is that the hacker was able to bypass the 2-step verification in place:

“As you have seen tonight, somehow someone got in through 2FA and gained control of my account. I have zero idea what the fuck happened and I will be looking in to this. In the meantime anything sent by me should not be trusted. I have changed all passwords and account info and have booted the bots from the server. I will need to figure out how this occurred as I was never sent an email with my 2FA asking for a log in - but for weeks now, people have been using insane and creative ways to try and hack or get my account. I can only imaging that somehow this worked obviously.”

After gaining control of the server, the hackers were able to impersonate the admin and Discord bots to advertise a forged NFT drop from Beeple on Nifty Gateway. Once fans saw the messages claiming to sell cheap Beeple NFT, they quickly FOMO’d in. Fans were anticipating an NFT release to coincide with his most recent auction and this resulted in many fans being affected by the scam. 

The Beeple team was able to gain control of the server about an hour later but could not stop people from minting fake NFTs. At the end of the day, the scammer was able to walk away with 38 ETH from users. 

Beeple responded to the hack by saying his team would never announce any “surprise” drops on Discord—they would only announce sales through regular channels.  

Discord compromises are starting to become a common occurrence in the crypto space. The scary thing about these two hacks is that hackers were able to bypass 2-step authentication. It would not be surprising to see more and more of these kinds of attacks, so always remember to double-check links and never give out your seed phrase. 

In light of these and many other attacks on Discord servers recently, there have been calls by many for Discord to integrate Web 3.0 connectivity options, including a MetaMask login that would ensure user verification and identification across every server. Discord revealed this week that it is considering adding these and related features.