Meta Sues Hackers Behind Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram Phishing Attacks

Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms on Monday said it has
filed a federal
lawsuit^[1] in the U.S. state of
California against bad actors who operated more than 39,000
phishing websites that impersonated its digital properties to
mislead unsuspecting users into divulging their login
credentials.

The social engineering scheme involved the creation of rogue
webpages that masqueraded as the login pages of Facebook,
Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, on which victims were prompted
to enter their usernames and passwords that were then harvested by
the defendants. The tech giant is also seeking $500,000 from the
anonymous actors.

The attacks were carried out using a relay service, Ngrok^[2], that redirected
internet traffic to the phishing websites in a manner that
concealed the true location of the fraudulent infrastructure. Meta
said the volume of these phishing attacks ramped up in volume since
March 2021 and that it worked with the relay service to suspend
thousands of URLs to the phishing websites.

“This lawsuit is one more step in our ongoing efforts to protect
people’s safety and privacy, send a clear message to those trying
to abuse our platform, and increase accountability of those who
abuse technology,” Jessica Romero, Meta’s director of platform
enforcement and litigation, said^[3]
in a statement.

The litigation comes days after the social technology company
announced it took steps to disrupt the activities of seven
surveillance-for-hire outfits^[4]
that created over 1,500 fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram to
target 50,000 users located in over 100 countries. Last month, Meta
said it had banned
four malicious cyber groups^[5]
for targeting journalists, humanitarian organizations, and
anti-regime military forces in Afghanistan and Syria.