Hackers Attacked NBA’s NFT Contract and Stole 100 Digital Images

A hacking incident for cryptocurrency projects is fairly usual. The latest crypto project that the hackers exploited is an NFT collection of the NBA playoffs. The sports fans of the National Basketball Association have been anticipating the NFT collection for the 2022 playoffs for quite some time. However, a group of smart contract hackers broke into the collection.

The NBA management recently told the media that the hackers were able to steal around 100 digital images. The market value of the stolen NFT collection has been estimated at around $68K. Cyber security firms have confirmed that hackers used non-whitelisted wallet backdoors to get priority execution for minting requests that allowed them to breach the NFT collection.

The Popularity of NBA NFT Collection

The National Basketball Association planned to launch its 2022 playoffs collection on the largest NFT marketplace called OpenSea. The consumers were planning to purchase and view the collection, the designated launch date that the NBA management announced. According to the media reports, there were a total of 18,000 NFT images and artboards in the collection.

Every professional Basketball player who is participating in the 2022 tournament is allotted 75 NFT images each. OpenSea NFT marketplace has managed to generate sales of 3,400 Ethereum tokens or $10 million worth of secondary NFT collections since its inception. NBA management decided to introduce a blind mint option for the users that will allow the sports fans to get a random assortment of NFT artwork. The mechanism is also reminiscent of traditional sports card purchases.

To make the process of increasing the credibility of the NFT collection for the NBA playoffs, the developers sourced the data for players’ scores and statistics from Chainlink. The Chainlink Oracle Network was able to render on-chain data while off-blockchain. The images will also keep updating automatically with the progression of the ongoing playoffs.

NBA annual revenue is valued at $10 billion; the sports fans are criticizing the organization for not conducting enough technical audits to ensure that the collection was secure against hack attempts. The NBA NFT team shared that they are taking their time to resolve the issue and fix the bug. On the other hand, the developers also declared that the listing date was too soon. NBA has also launched a private NFT marketplace called TopShot and the NBAxNFT Discord server with 58K subscribers.