Hacker Group Tracked Down, Compromised Nearly 1 Million Machines Through Facebook
The battle between web sites and hackers continues on. Facebook is often a great place for hackers to take advantage of, mostly because there’s Millions of users and also because it’s rather easy to trick people to click certain things or download certain things.
A couple weeks ago, we talked about the Ramnit worm which captured upwards of 45,000 login details. While that seems to be under control now, there was another worm making it’s way around the site.
This worm, with a strange title “Koobface”, took advantage of social networks, mostly Facebook, to compromise computers in order to gain full control of them. The gang behind it seems to have been found.
“The suspected gang were tracked down to St Petersburg after an investigation by Facebook and cybersecurity researchers. The worm gave the gang control of hundreds of thousands of computers (nearly 800,000). While not the largest such network of hijacked machines or “botnet”, the so-called Koobface worm is notable for its targeting of social networks.”
This kind of hacking is a serious crime with a prison sentence so they’re likely in a lot of trouble if they’re found to be guilty.
“The company estimates the gang was making in the region of $2m every year. But Mr Cluley says that the cybercriminals’ desire to keep an eye on their earnings assisted the researchers.”
“They were receiving daily SMS updates on how much money they were making, because we saw that – we could also see their phone numbers.” He says there is some frustration at the slow response of the authorities: “It’s pretty well known who they are now, we just need the Russian police to go and investigate this and stop them.”
How long of a prison sentence do you think they should serve?
