What is the most expensive “job offer” you have ever seen?
At Sky Mavis, the developer of the crypto game Axie Infinity, a forged offer worth over $600 million.
In March 2022, the world’s hottest blockchain game Axie Infinity $AXS suffered a major blow when hackers stole over $620 million worth of cryptocurrency from its sidechain $RONIN .
After the investigation results came out, everyone was stunned: the breakthrough in this astonishing heist turned out to be a fake job posting on LinkedIn.
The hackers disguised themselves as a headhunting company and contacted a senior engineer at Sky Mavis on LinkedIn, offering a position with a salary too high to refuse.
After several rounds of seemingly serious “interviews,” the engineer eventually received a “job offer letter” in PDF format.
Without a second thought, he downloaded and opened the file. As a result, this PDF contained malware, allowing the hackers to instantly infiltrate the company’s internal systems and ultimately control the critical nodes that validate transactions, successfully withdrawing massive funds.
After the incident, the FBI pointed fingers at the North Korea-related hacker group “Lazarus Group.”
It turns out, they just wanted to change jobs, but ended up being the “insider” in one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts in history.
In the crypto world, you not only need to guard against KPIs but also against PDFs. You never know where the next button for getting rich or going bankrupt might be hidden in an unexpected place.