CityDAO hacked for $95,000 via Discord

CityDAO, an experiment into decentralized land ownership, has been lost $95,000 to a hack by scammers on the gaming instant messaging site, Discord.

According to Discord’s Twitter account, the group are investigating the situation and released a tweet on Monday 10 January 2022, stating: “EMERGENCY NOTICE. A CityDAO Discord admin account has been hacked. THERE IS NO LAND DROP. DO NOT CONNECT YOUR WALLET.”

Starting with a real piece of land in Wyoming, where the aim was to build a blockchain city, CityDAO explores decentralized asset ownership on a chain.

Each parcel of land is a non-fungible token (NFT) that can be owned collectively by the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) of individuals. As it is a DAO it is managed by the community.

CityDAO uses Discord to issue alerts known as ‘land drops’ when an opportunity comes up to purchase such NFTs.

The hacker compromised Discord’s administration account, issuing a fake land drop, he then stole 29.67 ETH ($95,000) from the blockchain city.

One user, Lyons800, who fell victim to the hack tweeted that the attack was “a ridiculous security breach from Discord”, one that allowed the hacker to “bypass two-factor authentication and password”.

In a follow-up tweet, they added: “I ask everyone to please be extremely careful when clicking on links in servers, connecting your wallets to applications and just activities online in general.

“We are trying our best to resolve the issue in the best outcome possible so please bear with us.”

This is not the first hack made via Discord, in fact, this marks the second hack into the messaging site in less than one month. On 21 December 2022, Justin Kan’s NFT platform suffered a loss of $150,000 after hackers issued a fraudulent link promoting a new NFT to its users.

It seems that cryptocurrency technologies, especially Discord, remain vulnerable to hackers, and those interested in a piece of DAO space should always be mindful of the associated risks.

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Written by Isabella Aslam

Reporter

Isabella is an experienced writer in B2B and B2C journalism. Alongside crypto, Isabella writes and discusses the topics of relationships and psychology. Isabella holds a first-class degree in music journalism and often interviews electronic artists and DJs.

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