Milady Founder Discloses Cyberattack Resulting in ETH and NFTs Losses Exceeding $3 Million
In a surprising turn of events in the world of cryptocurrencies, Krishna Okhandiar, the founder and CEO of Remilia and the Milady NFT collection, took to Twitter to announce that they had fallen victim to a hacking incident. Strangely, over $3 million worth of crypto assets in the form of NFTs owned by the Remilia and Milady treasury were transferred and liquidated.
Okhandiar, who is commonly known by the nickname Charlotte Fang, claimed that hackers had breached their wallet, leading to the unauthorized selling and trading of several popular NFTs associated with Milady.
“I am deeply saddened to report that my system was hacked, compromising all imported wallets. If you receive any suspicious messages from any of my accounts, please treat them with caution. We are currently assessing the situation, and a technical post-mortem will follow. The primary damage was done to the Fumo LP and the NFTs we held staked in NFTX,” Okhandiar stated in a tweet.
Skepticism arose due to some unusual operations observed by Dumpster DAO, which focused on the depletion of Remilia’s treasury. Okhandiar’s response to these observations further fueled doubts. Chain analysis revealed that accounts connected to Remilia were funneling assets to a wallet believed to be controlled by the hacker. The liquidation of these assets in the wallet indicated that they were being sold off for approximately 850 ETH, equivalent to around $3 million based on the current market price.
The question arises: was this hack a deliberate act? Okhandiar claims that the hack was the result of an unknown malware that infiltrated their system and stole all the seed phrases stored in their password manager. These seed phrases were used to access wallets, including their multi-sig wallet holding Remilia’s treasury, as well as other personal wallets.
Okhandiar also emphasized the immutability of the NFT contract and stated that metadata was maintained to the standards of a hardware wallet.
Milady is a unique NFT project consisting of 10,000 Ethereum-based NFTs, each featuring original artwork of anime-style girls. The project gained significant attention after Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, tweeted about it in May 2023, which resulted in a surge in the floor price. However, Remilia is the DAO that holds sovereignty over the Milady crypto community.
Despite Okhandiar’s explanation of the events, members of the crypto community still harbor doubts. A detailed post-mortem analysis addressed many of these doubts, shedding light on how the hacker managed to steal the crypto assets in two separate waves. Storing private keys and seed phrases in an online password manager like Bitwarden was deemed a grave mistake, as it essentially invited crypto thieves to target the assets.
This incident highlights the need for crypto platforms to prioritize and strengthen their security measures in order to protect user assets. Only time will tell what steps the Remilia team will take to recover from these losses. Stay tuned for further updates on this developing story.