North Korean hackers hacked the creator of the Pepe meme. How it happened

Over the past couple of weeks, several projects associated with Pepe meme creator Matt Furie have been hacked. Well-known crypto investigator ZachXBT claims that hackers from North Korea, who were hired under the guise of competent employees, are behind the hacking of the projects. They managed to seize assets worth $1 million. GetBlock AML Research publishes a detailed history of the asset theft.

Who is Matt Furie

Matt Furie is a US comic book artist and illustrator. He gained a lot of popularity after creating Pepe the Frog, which became an internet meme in the 2010s.

Matt Furie

Furie is not involved with the meme coin Pepe, which ranks 28th on CoinMarketCap’s list of the largest cryptocurrencies by capitalization ($4,15 billion). But Furie has created his own company, ChainSaw, which has released several crypto projects using his creation, Pepe the Frog. These are mostly mini-games based on NFT tokens.

How the projects lost their funds

According to ZachXBT, ChainSaw hired several hackers from North Korea posing as technical experts. Once the attackers gained access to ChainSaw’s infrastructure, they manipulated smart contracts to be able to self-release new in-game NFTs for the Replicandy, Peplicator, Hedz, and Zogz mini-games.

Replicandy project NFT token sale

Hackers began releasing uncontrolled amounts of gaming NFTs, which they immediately sold. This continued until the price of NFTs fell to zero. In this way, the attackers managed to earn about $310 000. The proceeds were distributed among three addresses:

• 0xf6a9349c54d51f7f76bbd2afd755b5dd75e617ee
• 0x7e580f916a8e93871b72a694407fb7d790de96a6
• 0x58f4299465b261e79713e5c78a7629cd656aed36

Stolen funds withdrawal scheme

Next, the stolen funds were directed to the MEXC exchange. The same exchange address for deposits was used to consolidate another $680 000 that was allegedly stolen from the Favrr project. ZachXBT claims that Favrr CTO Alex Hong is a North Korean hacker, as his resume was falsified and his LinkedIn account was recently deleted.

No feedback

Despite the incident, Matt Furie and the ChainSaw team have not notified their users of the hack in any way. ZachXBT complained that the creator of the Pepe meme has not reached out to him.