Cybercriminals Hijack Azuki NFT Project's Twitter Account, Steal Over $750K in Assets

On Friday, the Twitter account of top NFT project Azuki was hacked, resulting in the theft of over $750,000 worth of crypto assets. The hackers took over the project's account and posted a link disguised as an invitation to participate in a virtual land mint in The Garden, Azuki's native metaverse platform. However, this link was actually a "wallet drainer," a type of phishing mechanism used to trick victims into approving transactions that transfer crypto assets from their wallets to the hackers.

According to data from Etherscan, the hackers drained $751,321 worth of USDC from one wallet within 30 minutes of posting the link. They also made off with over 3.9 ETH, 11 NFTs, and $6,742.62 in USDC from other wallets. Azuki's community manager, Emily Rose, was the first to confirm the hack and issued a warning to users not to click on any links posted by the account.

The management team of the anime-based NFT project was able to reclaim control of the Twitter account and remove the malicious tweets. They also released a statement saying that an investigation was underway and advised followers to check for simultaneous announcements on other Azuki media channels to verify their validity.

This is not the first time that the Azuki NFT project has been targeted in a social media crypto scandal. Last year, hackers hijacked several verified Twitter accounts and used them to promote fake Azuki NFT airdrops, including the account of the Indian University Grant Commission.

The news of the Azuki hack comes just two days after the Twitter profile of trading platform Robinhood was also compromised and used to push the sale of a fake crypto token. Although the Robinhood team was able to quickly recover the account and delete the false tweet, the hackers were still able to steal over $8,000 from unsuspecting investors.

These incidents are the only major cyber attacks on the crypto market so far in 2023, however the overall crypto market is still showing a bullish trend for the year, with a market cap of $1.002 trillion, representing about a 25.78% gain since the start of the year.