MSN Hacker!

[CrimsonInferno 35]

Okay guys, I'm here to tell you that last night at 12:00 am, my mother's MSN and thousands of other people were hacked. My mother's account has all her billing information, credits, important stuff, her businesses, and other things like that, things she can't get back.

 

I think I should just quite MSN :o

 

And I thought it worked better because I wasn't attacked with spam ads like Yahoo, but it seems Yahoo was a lot safer.

 

Well, we found out the hacker. A Islamic man in New York, Area code 1001. Account name? My mother will be reporting them all (four people total) including one from Nigeria -- that I tracked down via a message to my account.

 

Well, his account? Don't EVER open up a message from him at all. His account (Remember, don't message him!) is dmayforward@gmail.com :/

 

Please guys, report the dude if you can but DO NOT take any chances by talking to him. Also, the way it happened? My mother was talking to a help line in India for a official website's template maker. That's how it happened.

 

Be aware of anything and anyone. Do not share any information.

 

Good news though, some guy had the same problem and helped my ma get her account back. She's saving everything and shutting her account down. My mom got a secret password from Microsoft to a website where a member -- the admin and moderators wouldn't help! And neither would the FBI! Yea, we called them! -- but this member helped get the account back. The hacker might get back in, so my mother is removing all her bank stuff, credit numbers, taxes and all that. Wanna know who and what he was?

 

I'd advise saving all your important stuff and removing just in case.

[Polraudio 122]

Wow. Glad everything turned out good in the end.

Thats why i never put my personal information on the internet.

[CrimsonInferno 35]

Yea, but this person was stupid enough to fill in where they lived, so maybe they will pay for it?

[Noob Saibot 38]

I doubt you can call this a hack. More then likely it was nothing more then a Crack or Phisher, but I doubt a true hack.

[CrimsonInferno 35]

Phisher? What is that?

 

Well, this person was replying to my mother's friend's emails and my ma talked to him before this happened.

[Marked 197]

Ah I heard this type of thing on the news recently actually. They're getting your emails and then sending spam to your contacts, so the spam doesnt look like spam at all, looks like its from your acquaintance.

 

They still need a password. Sadly I fell for something like this once, which is completely shameful considering I'm supposed to be internet savy or whatever... But it was from this japanese girl from my contacts (on msn) who I did know personally, but she was strange so I thought she actually would upload photos to some strange site.... needless to say they got my password and started spamming my contacts... >.

[Noob Saibot 38]

Phisher? What is that?

 

Well, this person was replying to my mother's friend's emails and my ma talked to him before this happened.

 

 

In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting public. Phishing is typically carried out by e-mail or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to fool users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security measures.

 

A phishing technique was described in detail in 1987, and the first recorded use of the term "phishing" was made in 1996. The term is a variant of fishing, probably influenced by phreaking, and alludes to baits used to "catch" financial information and passwords.

 

 

Link manipulation

 

Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed to make a link in an e-mail (and the spoofed website it leads to) appear to belong to the spoofed organization. Misspelled URLs or the use of subdomains are common tricks used by phishers. In the following example URL, http://www.yourbank.example.com/, it appears as though the URL will take you to the example section of the yourbank website; actually this URL points to the "yourbank" (i.e. phishing) section of the example website. Another common trick is to make the displayed text for a link (the text between the <A> tags) suggest a reliable destination, when the link actually goes to the phishers' site. The following example link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine, appears to take you to an article entitled "Genuine"; clicking on it will in fact take you to the article entitled "Deception". In the lower left hand corner of most browsers you can preview and verify where the link is going to take you.

 

An old method of spoofing used links containing the '@' symbol, originally intended as a way to include a username and password (contrary to the standard). For example, the link http://www.google.com@members.tripod.com/ might deceive a casual observer into believing that it will open a page on www.google.com, whereas it actually directs the browser to a page on members.tripod.com, using a username of www.google.com: the page opens normally, regardless of the username supplied. Such URLs were disabled in Internet Explorer, while Mozilla Firefox and Opera present a warning message and give the option of continuing to the site or cancelling.

 

A further problem with URLs has been found in the handling of Internationalized domain names (IDN) in web browsers, that might allow visually identical web addresses to lead to different, possibly malicious, websites. Despite the publicity surrounding the flaw, known as IDN spoofing[33] or homograph attack, phishers have taken advantage of a similar risk, using open URL redirectors on the websites of trusted organizations to disguise malicious URLs with a trusted domain. Even digital certificates do not solve this problem because it is quite possible for a phisher to purchase a valid certificate and subsequently change content to spoof a genuine website.

 

Filter evasion

 

Phishers have used images instead of text to make it harder for anti-phishing filters to detect text commonly used in phishing e-mails.

 

Website forgery

 

Once a victim visits the phishing website the deception is not over. Some phishing scams use JavaScript commands in order to alter the address bar. This is done either by placing a picture of a legitimate URL over the address bar, or by closing the original address bar and opening a new one with the legitimate URL.

 

An attacker can even use flaws in a trusted website's own scripts against the victim. These types of attacks (known as cross-site scripting) are particularly problematic, because they direct the user to sign in at their bank or service's own web page, where everything from the web address to the security certificates appears correct. In reality, the link to the website is crafted to carry out the attack, making it very difficult to spot without specialist knowledge. Just such a flaw was used in 2006 against PayPal.

 

A Universal Man-in-the-middle (MITM) Phishing Kit, discovered in 2007, provides a simple-to-use interface that allows a phisher to convincingly reproduce websites and capture log-in details entered at the fake site.

 

To avoid anti-phishing techniques that scan websites for phishing-related text, phishers have begun to use Flash-based websites. These look much like the real website, but hide the text in a multimedia object.

 

Information provided By: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

[CrimsonInferno 35]

Did you ever get it back? Did they change all the contact information and passwords?