Rarely has a job application backfired more spectacularly than in the case of one senior engineer at Axie Infinity, whose interest in joining what turned out to be a fictitious company led to one of the crypto sector’s biggest hacks. Ronin, the Ethereum-linked sidechain that underpins play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, lost $540 million in crypto to an exploit in March. While the US government later tied the incident to North Korean hacking group Lazarus, full details of how the exploit was carried out have not been disclosed. The Block can now reveal that a fake job ad was Ronin’s undoing. According to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who were granted anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the incident, a senior engineer at Axie Infinity was duped into applying for a job at a company that, in reality, did not exist. Axie Infinity was huge. At its peak, workers in Southeast Asia were even able to earn a living through the play-to-earn game. It boasted 2.7 million daily active users and $214 million in weekly trading volume for its in-game NFTs in November last year — although both numbers have since plummeted.
Read more : How a fake job offer took down the world’s most popular crypto game.
