OpenSea Says It Patched an NFT Phishing Vulnerability

OpenSea, a popular marketplace for non-fungible tokens, has closed an NFT phishing loophole discovered by Check Point Research, a division of publicly traded security firm Check Point Software Technologies.

• Check Point wrote about the discovery in a blog post on Wednesday and outlined the scam in a video, saying that clicking pop-ups associated with malicious, airdropped NFTs could have provided access to customers’ wallets.
• The company said that it notified OpenSea of the vulnerability on Sept. 26 and that OpenSea fixed the issue and verified the fix within an hour.
• “It’s important to note had an attacker attempted to take advantage of this flaw, the end user would have needed to approve the malicious transaction through a wallet signature,” OpenSea wrote in its own blog post about the issue on Wednesday. It said it hadn’t been able to identify any instances where the vulnerability was exploited.
• The phishing attack is a common tactic in the world of NFTs – thieves will send fishy tokens to public addresses on the Ethereum blockchain and wait for users to interact with them.
• Scams are still pervasive on the platform, and throughout crypto in general, as CoinDesk outlined in this piece on NFT phishing schemes.