Malware is now becoming more prevalent. They want to steal personal information and compromise user data. A victim recently unintentionally lost "a life-changing sum" of money as a result of a Google Ads search result.
On January 14, an NFT influencer falsely claimed to have downloaded malware accidently after coming across it in a Google Ads search result, losing their whole net worth in nonfungible tokens and cryptocurrencies.
The NFT God Twitter user sent a series of tweets explaining how his entire digital life—including his bitcoin wallet and numerous online accounts—had been compromised.
Last night my entire digital livelihood was violated.
— NFT God (@NFT_GOD) January 15, 2023
Every account connected to me both personally and professionally was hacked and used to hurt others.
Less importantly, I lost a life changing amount of my net worth
NFT God claims to have used Google's search engine to get the free software for streaming video called OBS. Instead of going to the official website, he decided to click on the sponsored advertisement for what he thought was the same thing.
It wasn't until hours later that he realized malware had also been downloaded from the sponsored advertisement in addition to the program he wanted.
Every channel of communication he has with his neighborhood, neighbors, and family has been broken over the past 24 hours. Bad guys broke in and took over his wallets, Gmail, Twitter, Substack, and Discord accounts.
He quickly removes the phony tweets created by the hackers. However, he received a message with the following text:
"Dude you WETH’d your ape?”
What a terrible thing he did not expect to find when he accesses his ape's Opensea bookmark is a listing for an entirely different wallet than the owner.
NFT God believes that the fundamental mistake that permitted the wallet breach was setting up his hardware wallet as a hot wallet by entering its seed phrase in a way that does not keep it cold or offline. This mistake allowed the hackers to seize control of his crypto and NFTs.
Losing this account and the community I built would be a nightmare to me
— NFT God (@NFT_GOD) January 15, 2023
Money is replaceable. My brand and community isn't
Let's talk about the digital assets though and how I lost them.
The number 1 question I got yesterday was "Did you have a cold wallet?"
Blockchain data shows that his wallet was stolen along with a Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT, whose floor price is currently 16 ETH ($25,000), a number of additional NFTs, and at least 19 ETH, which at the time had a value of about $27,000.
The attacker moved the majority of the ETH through various wallets before sending it to the decentralized exchange (DEX) FixedFloat, where it was traded for unknown cryptocurrencies.
Google Chrome and other Chromium-based web browsers are prone to harmful flaws, according to cyber experiences from Imperva Red Team. This is just one of several severe Google mistakes that result in consumers losing their personal information, which has caused investors to lately remove cryptocurrency from online platforms and centralized exchanges in an effort to preserve their holdings.
