Breaking: Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) Discord Hacked, NFT Stolen

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), the world’s most valuable NFT collection, said on Friday that its Discord server was compromised, and that other servers were also being attacked. The collection warned its followers against minting anything from Discord for the moment.

BAYC said a webhook in its discord had been briefly compromised, but had been caught almost immediately. The NFT collection’s discord is currently under lockdown.

Blockchain security firm Peckshield reported that Etherscan data showed a Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT (#8662)  was stolen. The token is currently worth over 21 ETH ($68,900) on OpenSea. Data also showed that the token in question was sold on the platform in the past hour.

STAY SAFE. Do not mint anything from any Discord right now. A webhook in our Discord was briefly compromised. We caught it immediately but please know: we are not doing any April Fools stealth mints / airdrops etc. Other Discords are also being attacked right now.

-BAYC said on their Twitter handle

Stolen Apes everywhere

Separately, Taiwanese singer Jay Chou said his tokens were stolen in a phishing attack. The stolen goods included a BAYC, a Mutant Ape Yacht Club, two Doodles, and 169 ETH ($549,000), according to data from Etherscan.

It was unclear if the two incidents were related, given that they happened about a day apart, and were from different ETH wallets.

Owned by Yuga Labs, BAYC is the most valuable NFT collection by total value, which is at about 1.2 million ETH ($3.9 billion). The collection saw a surge in popularity through March after it introduced its own native token, ApeCoin.

Crypto-related heists on the rise?

Today’s hack comes shortly after one of the biggest ever crypto hacks in history, where an attack on the Ronin Network stole more than $600 million from the reserves of popular crypto game Axie Infinity.

Crypto’s digital reliance makes the space extremely vulnerable to cyber attacks, despite constant efforts from developers to avoid such a scenario. The space has seen several notable heists over the past decade, with the largest, prior to Axie, being that of Japanese exchange Coincheck.