Russian Hacker Swaggers of Having 1.5 million Facebook Accounts for Sale
By Jason on May 14, 2010 | Computer Security, Hacker, Facebook, Kirllos, Facebook account, forum, Russia
Recently Facebook identified a hacker who boasted of having 1.5 million Facebook accounts for sale. He was selling it at underground hacking forums. The hacker named Kirllos was offering accounts for anyone who wanted to spam, steal or scam on Facebook.
Kirllos was noticed by researchers at VeriSign 's iDefense group after he announced about having a quite large amount of accounts for sale. As VeriSign states, Kirllos is selling those accounts for $25 and $45 per 1,000 accounts, depending on the connections that Facebook user has.
It seems like Kirllos already had sold about 700,000 accounts and nobody knows about their legitimacy. Facebook spokesman Simon Axten claims that there is no information about the identity of Kirllos, because they just determined him through IP addresses, online accounts and etc. He also says that now its forensics team is trying to find out a sameness of Kirllos.
Axten also mentions that the hacker is based out of Russia. Even though that Facebook investigators haven't a whole view of this puzzle, however, Axten claims that they have a scenario of what the Kirllos had done. "He did have some Facebook credentials in his possession as we were able to detect suspicious logins on certain accounts," Axten said. "However, the number of accounts found was orders of magnitude less than what was reported. We reset the password on all affected accounts and notified the account owners."
It is quite clear that Kirllos will not be prosecuted because he is based out of Russia. It is difficult to arrest Russian hackers chiefly if the hacking appeared in another country. There is no traces of Kirllos on hacking forums today.
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