A fake job offer on LinkedIn is said to be the basis of the attack on the NFT game Axie Infinity. Half a billion dollars in cryptocurrency was stolen in that attack.
The blockchain bridge of the NFT game Axie Infinity was hacked last month, with the attackers taking about half a billion dollars in crypto coins. That incident would now have started with a classic form of phishing, news site The Block writes, based on anonymous sources.
The attackers, who according to the US government are part of the North Korean group Lazarus, are said to have targeted employees of Sky Mavis, the developer of Axie Infinity. Through false job offers on LinkedIn, they allegedly addressed the employees and guided them through several false rounds of job interviews.
When a senior engineer finally clicked on a PDF containing the final offer, his computer was infected. From there, the attackers were able to take over several nodes used to approve financial transactions on the Ronin blockchain.
While the game will run on a decentralized system, in November during a very busy period, Axie Infinity decided to allow Sky Mavis to use five of the nine nodes to approve transactions. In this way, the attackers were able to get away with a large amount of crypto money, worth, at the time, more than $ 620 million. In the meantime, however, the price has fallen sharply.
For a while, Axie Infinity was seen as a model for play-to-earn games, games where you don’t play for fun, but to collect NFTs that hopefully increase in value. The game uses an image and game style that is reminiscent of Pokémon and other games in which cute monsters fight against each other. However, it is currently best known for being the victim of one of the most lucrative crypto attacks ever.