Fake LinkedIn Job Offer ‘Killed’ Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity has experienced a lot of drawbacks which has pushed many to refer to it as a mere Axie Finite. Once the most popular play-to-earn (P2E) crypto game in the world, Axie Infinity has since then fallen from grace and now heading to grass.

Everything was all rosy and great until a fraudulent LinkedIn job recruiter duped an Axie Infinity employee to click on a malicious PDF. This incident opened the flood gates to a devastating hack that left the project on its knees.

Based on previous reports, the US government noted that the malicious team behind the huge breach is Lazarus, a North Korean hacker group. Axie Infinity lost a staggering $540 million in the March exploit,.

Fake Job Offer Destroyed Axie Infinity

Citing two sources with direct and in-depth knowledge of this matter, reporters said that employees at Sky Mavis, Axie Infinity’s developer, were approached by the hackers who posed as job recruiters on LinkedIn. One of the employees, a senior engineer, fell for the scheme and attended several interviews.

As you may have guessed, the engineer supposedly passed these “interviews” with flying colors and got a ‘job offer’ in the form of a PDF. Sadly, they went on to download the malicious file and as a result the hackers managed to infiltrate Ronin, the Ethereum-based sidechain that powers Axie Infinity.

A Ronin blog post commented on the March attack:

“This employee no longer works at Sky Mavis. The attacker managed to leverage that access to penetrate Sky Mavis IT infrastructure and gain access to the validator nodes.”

Axie Infinity was influenced by Pokemon and it was once the best and most popular crypto game in the budding sector. Some people were not big fans of the game since its buy-in costs were considerably high. For anyone to start playing, they needed to own at least three Axies to battle against other in-game opponents. Axies are unique creatures that have a variety of quirks and skill sets.

In the summer of last year, Axies were valued at between $230 and $312,000. At the time, this game was so popular that one YouTube documentary highlighted that many low-income workers in the Philippines relied on Axie Infinity for their livelihood. How was that possible? The game gave out rewards in the form of crypto known as Smooth Love Potion (SLP).

Between the current crypto winter that seems to be demolishing the weak players in the sector and the March exploit, and according to some analysts, a poor economic strategy, Axie Infinity was bound to wither and eventually die off – even without the involvement of the fake LinkedIn recruiters.

The team is trying to salvage what is left of the project but critics believe that it is too little too late and it will soon come to a screeching painful stop.