Origin Protocol’s co-founder Josh Fraser pointed out some of the popular platform’s vulnerabilities
Discord was founded in 2015 to connect and communicate with gamers. It quickly became the preferred community communication platform for all crypto-based businesses and projects. Discord is the preferred community engagement platform for many blockchain, NFT and crypto projects.
Discord is plagued with security and privacy issues. Hacks have occurred, accounts were compromised, and many other problems like server security. Origin Protocol founder Josh Fraser highlighted several of these issues recently in a recent article. Twitter threadHe posted the information to inform the public about potential dangers of Discord.
Fraser states that unauthorised third parties may gain many insight into different Discord projects’ internal workings because Discord API leaks information such as name, description and members list.Every private channel is available on each server. Because many cryptocurrency projects use Discord to communicate privately with each other for multiple reasons, such as collaborations on unannounced partnership announcements, product launches, exchange listings and so on, it’s incorrect to believe that they are secretive as the users think.
Fraser shows how, despite Discord indicating via an icon, private servers were discovered to be not private for Binance staff and OpenSea servers by Solana launch partners.
Here are the potential dangers. For starters, Discord’s security breaches range from leaking private server information, private user data (which can be used for doxing), and activity data (which can indicate an upcoming listing or release), to crypto projects using their multisig wallet addresses as the description for their private channels, which can potentially flag otherwise unremarkable data to malicious eavesdroppers. This is in addition to Discord compromising trust (and the users of its servers) by failing to secure data that should not be public.
These issues were raised by Fraser to Discord, but it doesn’t seem like they will soon be resolved. Public awareness of security concerns is important and they should take all necessary precautions to ensure their privacy.