'Blockchain City' CityDAO Falls Victim to $95K Hack via Discord

CityDAO, the experiment into decentralized land ownership, has fallen victim to a $95,000 hack by fraudsters on gaming instant messaging site Discord.

• An attacker hacked one of the project's admin accounts on Discord, according to the group's Twitter account.
• "EMERGENCY NOTICE. A CityDAO Discord admin account has been hacked. THERE IS NO LAND DROP. DO NOT CONNECT YOUR WALLET," CityDAO tweeted Monday.
• CityDAO's founders purchased 40 acres of land in Wyoming in November with the intention of building a "blockchain city."
• The project's aim is to build a city with decentralized governance, where "citizens" purchase land in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). CityDAO uses Discord to issue alerts known as "land drops" when there are opportunities to purchase said NFTs.
• The attacker issued a fake land drop from the admin's compromised account, pocketing 29.67 ETH ($95,000) in the process.
• The affected admin, "Lyons800", subsequently tweeted that the attack was "a ridiculous security breach from Discord."
• This marks a second large hack via Discord in less than a month. On Dec. 21, Justin Kan's NFT platform Fractal suffered a breach in which someone hacked the project's account to issue a fraudulent link to users promoting a new NFT, making off with around $150,000.

Read more: Polygon Discloses Patched Exploit That Put 9B MATIC at Risk