September 7, 2021
Professional US ethical hacker Sam Curry informed Banksy’s team that the artist’s website had a security flaw, seven days before a hacker defrauded a fan out of $336,000.
Curry, who is also the founder of security consulting firm Palisade, explained the earlier warnings: “I was in a security forum and multiple people were posting links to the site. I’d clicked one and immediately saw it was vulnerable, so I reached out to Banksy’s team via email as I wasn’t sure if anyone else had. They didn’t respond over email, so I tried a few other ways to contact them including their Instagram, but never received a response.”
While the new site, named “Banksy.co.uk/NFT”, was deleted soon after the auction, Curry informed that the site vulnerability “allowed you to create arbitrary files on the website” and publish your own pages and content.
The vulnerability has since been fixed, and the affected British NFT collector who was scammed reported that the hacker returned most of the money to him at the end of the day.
For more information, read the original story on the BBC.
