In just one week, hackers targeted the Discord channels of five cryptocurrency companies, compromising their platforms with malicious links.
Witness Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, zkSync, and Orderly Network all fell victim to these attacks.
Social media is a dangerous place
The decentralized physical infrastructure networks focused blockchain, Witness Chain became the fifth company to have its Discord channel breached.
Hackers infiltrated the channel by posting fake links designed to deceive users.
Pankaj Agarwal, a core contributor to the project, quickly warned members on the X, cautioning them against interacting with suspicious links. Agarwal soon reported that the server had been restored and secured again.
No land for crypto communities
Prior to the Witness Chain incident, the Discord channels of Polygon, Avalanche, zkSync, and Orderly Network were also hacked, in an attack spree.
These attacks happened on August 24, 25, and 29, all following a similar pattern involving phishing links that lured users into scams.
There are rumors about behind the attacks are the same hacker or group, but in fact no one knows nothing certain.
The first of these attacks happened on August 24, when Polygon’s Discord channel was compromised. Hackers used phishing links to trick users, leading to big losses. One user lost $150,000 due to these fraudulent links.
@0xPolygon I lost $150,000 of my Ethereum pool in one go through Polygon's official Discord announcement. Why haven't you officially posted the Discord hacking issue on X? How are you going to take responsibility for this?
— Mr.K (@ValidatorK) August 24, 2024
Polygon’s Chief Security Officer, Mehta Gupta alerted users to avoid clicking on any links until further notice.
Beware of the links!
Within two days, attacks struck Avalanche and zkSync’s Discord channels too. Hackers used fake links again, to bait unaware users.
One Avalanche user shared a screenshot on social media, showing that chat functions were disabled across all channels, with an announcement falsely claiming that users could claim AVAX tokens from the foundation.
Just an hour after Avalanche was hit, zkSync’s Discord channel suffered a similar breach.
Despite the scale of these hacks, the security teams behind these crypto platforms acted pretty fast to regain control of their compromised Discord channels.
After that, each of the affected companies successfully recovered their servers and removed the malicious links.
