OpenSea Data Breach Means Every User’s Email Address Is At Risk

OpenSea users are checking their emails today and receiving news that they are victims of a data breach. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the biggest NFT marketplace in the world has found itself having to relay a similar message to users.

In January, OpenSea suffered a phishing attack. In fact, over $1.7 million in NFTs went missing from platform users. The latest event has again put users at risk with a massive data breach.

How did the OpenSea data breach happen?

The latest security issue at OpenSea has forced the company to email users and release a statement about the incident. According to the NFT marketplace, the data breach at OpenSea directly resulted from a third-party employee.

In a tweet to their 1.7 million followers, they said, “An employee of our email vendor, http://Customer.io, misused their employee access to download & share email addresses with an unauthorized external party. Email addresses provided to OpenSea by users or newsletter subscribers were impacted.”

One thing that remains unclear is the scale of the data breach at OpenSea. However, Twitter is full of comments from people who have received an email from the platform. One user, @EclecticMethod, made fun of the situation and said, “OpenSea has decentralized our email addresses.”

Today, many people will receive this email informing them, “At this time, we believe that your email address may have been part of the customer.io data incident.” 

Meanwhile, the advice from OpenSea is to remain cautious, double-check the website you are receiving emails from, and keep your password and secret phrase to yourself. What’s more, the company will never ask you to sign a wallet transaction directly from an email.

OpenSea platform is one of the number one hacking targets

The NFT platform dominates the NFT landscape with over 80% of the total market share. As the biggest NFT marketplace in the world, it is the number one target for hackers and scammers. As stated above, this is not the first time that OpenSea has suffered an attack such as a data breach.

Furthermore, they have hundreds of thousands of users. Essentially, this means that any attack exposes a significant amount of the NFT community.

OpenSea remains committed to ‘protecting’ platform users.

Earlier in June, the co-founder of OpenSea, CEO Devin Finzer, released a blog post. This post described the company’s plans to protect users, and he shared his views on user safety.

In particular, he wanted to highlight the matter of growing the company whilst delivering a secure user experience. He said, “We at OpenSea feel a huge responsibility to ensure our users are safe while also providing the most expansive, inclusive access to the NFT ecosystem possible.”

In addition, he talked about the new verification service, along with a new copymint prevention system. However, this does nothing to persuade OpenSea users of their online safety if things like the data breach can happen on the NFT marketplace platform.