Confidences of an ingenious hacker – L’Orient Today

Dear journal,

I noticed that email scams don’t work as much as they used to. It’s time to change course, because pretending to be an emigrant prince in search of support no longer really attracts potential victims.

My focus will now be on fake social media accounts.

In fact, Elon Musk’s problem with Twitter bots inspired me. If the world’s smartest entrepreneur has a social media bot detection problem, my fake accounts would certainly go unnoticed. Plus, it’s easy and free!

So I chose to copy the profiles and website of a fairly well-known online sales site: venteenligne.com. Scamming their customers was so easy… I only had to create two pages: one on Twitter and the other on Facebook with the same name as their official page, with their photos, posts and offers. I even replicated their site and added their offers with a price discount. This allowed me to fool several users who entered their credit cards on my page!

Unfortunately for the victims, venteenligne.com only realized my manipulations too late; several people had already lost money for my pleasure. What’s worse is that the site blamed the victims, claiming that they chose the wrong page, without paying attention to the URL. And the icing on the cake? My site is still active!

I should however admit that I also had a failure. I applied the exact same method to another target, but my site and social media pages were all gone the next day.

Cheer ! Those must surely use Digital Risk Protection (DRP), a crucial solution to monitor their online presence and neutralize threats before attacks occur.

I will have to find other methods. I have so many ideas… Until next time.

Written by Élie Zeidan, manager at Potech Consulting, and Maria Héléna Moukheiber, cybersecurity consultant at Potech Consulting.

Dear Diary, I noticed that email scams don’t work as much as they used to. It’s time to change the method, because pretending to be an emigrant prince in search of support no longer really attracts potential victims. My focus will now be on fake social media accounts. In fact, Elon Musk’s problem with Twitter bots made me…