Magic Eden Users Were Seeing Porn While Loading Collection’s Page

Early in January, Magic Eden NFT marketplace surprised users by showing pornographic images instead of NFT thumbnails.

Alex Harutunian

Jan 16, 2023 - 1 min read

Magic Eden, a Solana-based marketplace for NFTs, had to reassure users on January 3^rd that their NFTs were “secure” due to an increase in pornographic images on its website. The platform explained that they hadn’t been hacked, and the inappropriate images were the result of a “compromised” third-party image hosting service.

Hey guys our image provider, a 3rd party service we use to cache images, was compromised. Your NFTs are safe and Magic Eden has not been hacked. Unfortunately you might've seen some um, unsavory images. Make sure you do a hard refresh on your browser to fix it.
— Magic Eden 🪄 (@MagicEden) January 3, 2023

While some were seeing unsavoury images, others were seeing images from the show The Big Bang Theory.

Yo @MagicEden wtf is this pic.twitter.com/Xums9EZtm6
— Fede (@fedeonekenoby) January 3, 2023

Uhhhhhh https://t.co/VT2m8fBrPh pic.twitter.com/NEftIkywHu
— Clôwn (@Yaboibeclownin) January 3, 2023

Magic Eden advised users to do a “hard refresh” of their browser to get rid of the problem, which means clearing the browser’s cache and reloading the most recent version of the website. After the “hard refresh”, the issue hasn’t been bothering most users.

The company does not believe that it was specifically targeted via the hack on the third-party vendor. Moreover, the NFT startup would not name the image caching partner due to security concerns.

The hosting of NFTs on centralised web servers can be problematic, such as instances of servers going offline. For instance, when the FTX exchange collapsed, Coachella NFTs, which had sold for $1.5 million, were stuck on FTX after the exchange filed for bankruptcy. However, it appears that the Magic Eden website itself experienced the issue due to an attack on an external service provider, and that the actual NFTs themselves were ultimately unaffected. We continue to observe.