Bad news for digital art tokens owners. This weekend, Australian user Geoffrey Huntley put online a website in which he assures that more than 20TB are stored and ready for download in torrents with all the value of non-fungible tokens (NFT) of blockchain. The appearance of The NFT Bay, named in reference to the popular platform The Pirate Bay, has generated multiple doubts among enthusiasts of these tokens, in addition to paying for the discussion about the ownership of supposedly unique files.
According to a report published by The Verge, upon entering the website, an almost exact replica of The Pirate Bay’s actual platform, visitors will be able to find a downloadable file identified as “preview.jpg”, which includes multiple images from the NFT collection known as Bored Ape, plus multiple ZIP files purportedly containing all the NFTs Huntley mentions, taken from the Ethereum and Solana blockchain platforms.
From this incident a topic of popular discussion reappeared in this community: those people who do not have great esteem for NFTs believe that this is the clearest sign that these files really have no value at all, while enthusiasts downplay these leaks, arguing that there are more factors than a simple image to prove the legitimate ownership of an NFT.
While both positions lay out their arguments, Huntley mentions that he did this to remind the community that these files are usually not stored on the blockchain, but simply link to a version stored on a potentially vulnerable web server. Through a question-and-answer session on Reddit, Huntley says that this is a simple mockery of the NFT concept: “People want to claim ownership of something on the Internet, where anyone can hack anything,” he concludes.
On Huntley’s claim, the researchers do not yet have the means to claim that the torrents available in The NFT Bay actually contain all the NFTs that exist in the aforementioned blockchain platforms, in addition to the fact that they are more than 200TB undoubtedly make it difficult to investigate.
To learn more about information security risks, malware variants, vulnerabilities and information technologies, feel free to access the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) websites.
He is a well-known expert in mobile security and malware analysis. He studied Computer Science at NYU and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2003. He is actively working as an anti-malware expert. He also worked for security companies like Kaspersky Lab. His everyday job includes researching about new malware and cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in mobile security and mobile vulnerabilities.
