Creature Toadz NFT project suffered a theft of around $340,000 when a hacker, posing as a moderator, convinced community members to send 88 ETH to an address he controlled yesterday. However, in a surprising turn of events he returned all stolen assets to the project.
The hacker, whose username was revealed to be HEERR on Twitter, was able to hack into the Discord server of the project using a Webhooks vulnerability present on the social media site to hijack the channel.
They then proceeded to pose as a moderator of the project before asking unsuspecting community members to stealth mint Creature Toadz via a web link.
Before the members could deduce that this was a fraud, they collectively sent 88 ETH which translated to roughly $368,000 to the hacker's address. The Creature Toadz NFT team revealed that their channel was compromised for close to 45 minutes.
While the hacker later returned all of the stolen funds to the team behind the project, his intentions are being questioned as some have placed him in the same class as the hacker who hacked Poly Network but later returned the funds.
On the other hand, some community members of the project believe he only returned stolen funds because his identity was unraveled by an analyst who was also a community member of the project.
How his identity was unraveled was how his identity was unraveled.
An anonymous NFT analyst, OKHotShot, trailing the hacker's Ethereum transaction history was able to deduce that the hacker was HEERR who claimed to be a 17-year-old high school student and that the hack was only meant to be a joke. The above was revealed during a discussion held on Twitter by Andrew Wang and Creature Toadz community where the hacker publicly claimed responsibility for the hack. It was during this discussion that OKHotShot beseeched the hacker to return stolen funds to the team.
After the session, the hacker returned the funds to the Creature Toadz team who have chosen not to press charges against the attacker.