NFTs on Magic Eden being Hacked? What More is There to Know

NFTs on Magic Eden being Hacked, users saw some curious images on the platform instead of the NFTs

NFTs on Magic Eden being Hacked: users of Magic Eden, the largest Solana marketplace, saw some curious images on the platform over the past day instead of the NFTs they tried to view—including pornographic images and stills from the TV series "The Big Bang Theory." Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Magic Eden has stated that it'll reimburse all users who were tricked into buying counterfeit NFTs on its website due to an exploit. Tweets posted by Magic Eden users pointed to the platform that sometimes, pornographic images were loaded on a collection's page instead of the NFT thumbnails. Other users reported seeing images from the television series The Big Bang Theory instead of the correct NFT images.

According to Cointelegraph, the marketplace said that 25 fraudulent NFTs were sold across four collections in the past 24 hours, but is yet to receive confirmation whether additional NFTs were affected. Reportedly, two of the affected projects included Solana-oriented collections ABC and y00ts. It is believed that the NFT platform found a solution by temporarily disabling booth tools and removing "entry points" which permitted unverified NFTs to pass. It also asked users to perform a "hard refresh" to get confirmation that unverified listings are not appearing on their browser extension.

The marketplace is blaming a hacked image caching service for the brief mix-up. Magic Eden, which also supports NFTs on Ethereum and Polygon, tweeted late Tuesday afternoon that "a third-party service" used for caching images had been compromised. Users began tweeting about the issue late Monday.

The fake listings began earlier this morning with the ABC collection, which the marketplace appeared to have solved by adding more verification layers, according to a tweet.

Meanwhile, Magic Eden said in a Thursday morning update that it would refund affected users. "We have identified in the last 24 hours, the impact was contained to 25 unverified NFTs sold across 4 collections," developers said.

"These unverified NFTs showed up on the collection pages and transactions of unverified NFTs showed up in the activity tabs of the collections."

"The issue has been resolved as of this morning. Magic Eden is safe for trading and we will refund all the users who mistakenly bought unverified NFTs specifically due to this issue," the developers added.

It's the second snag Magic Eden has seen in the past 24 hours. On Tuesday, users reported seeing pornographic images in place of their NFTs, an issue the marketplace identified as linked to its third-party image caching service.

A Magic Eden representative told Decrypt shortly after the tweet announcement that the startup, valued at $1.6 billion as of June 2022, first became aware of the situation early this afternoon and implemented a fix within an hour. However, some users were still seeing the unexpected images and need to refresh their web browser, so the statement was made.

The company does not believe that it was specifically targeted via the hack on the third-party vendor, a representative added, which Magic Eden believes affected other websites as well. The NFT startup would not name the image caching partner due to security concerns.