- Aug 30, 2012
- 6,598
Florian Lukavsky turned the table on some Whaling hackers.
Whaling is when hackers send "urgent" requests for payment to financial officers pretending to be coming from the CEO of the company. The FBI estimates some $2.2bn in losses have arisen from nearly 14,000 whaling cases in the seven months to May this year. Some $800m in losses occurred in the 10 months to August 2015.
"Someone impersonated the CEO of an international company requesting urgent wire transfers and a couple of hours later they realize it was a scam … we worked together with law enforcement to trick the fraudsters," Lukavsky says.
"We sent them a prepared PDF document pretending to be transaction confirmation and they opened it which led to Twitter handles, usernames, and identity information."
"We were able to get the Windows 10 usernames and hashes which are tied by default to Outlook."
The information Lukavsky shared with authorities led to the arrest of whalers located in Africa.
Lukavsky joins a small group of hackers who are turning the tables on scammers. It was recently reported about the hacker who sent a ransomware scammer a fake PDF which contained the Locky ransomware virus.
Source: The Register
Whaling is when hackers send "urgent" requests for payment to financial officers pretending to be coming from the CEO of the company. The FBI estimates some $2.2bn in losses have arisen from nearly 14,000 whaling cases in the seven months to May this year. Some $800m in losses occurred in the 10 months to August 2015.
"Someone impersonated the CEO of an international company requesting urgent wire transfers and a couple of hours later they realize it was a scam … we worked together with law enforcement to trick the fraudsters," Lukavsky says.
"We sent them a prepared PDF document pretending to be transaction confirmation and they opened it which led to Twitter handles, usernames, and identity information."
"We were able to get the Windows 10 usernames and hashes which are tied by default to Outlook."
The information Lukavsky shared with authorities led to the arrest of whalers located in Africa.
Lukavsky joins a small group of hackers who are turning the tables on scammers. It was recently reported about the hacker who sent a ransomware scammer a fake PDF which contained the Locky ransomware virus.
Source: The Register
