Cloned Boy
Professional
- Messages
- 1,177
- Reaction score
- 889
- Points
- 113
Hackers appeared almost immediately after the Internet appeared. In our information age, cybercrime is becoming more and more common, and the methods for this are becoming more and more complex. In this topic, I will tell you about it. You will learn about what types of hackers there are, what a DDoS attack is and what is sold on the darknet. You will learn about Anonymous and how one Romanian hacker managed to hack the mail of dozens of famous people and politicians. In this topic, I will tell you about hackers from North Korea, about hacker pranks and what catfishing is. From this topic, you will learn about social engineering and much more!
In this topic, I will tell you about people who commit crimes in the virtual world via the Internet, often causing great damage and remaining undetected and anonymous. These are 10 interesting facts about hackers and cybercrime. When someone talks about hackers, associations with hacking, viruses, trojans and other fairly advanced technical things immediately come to mind.
But hackers do not always use such complex methods to hack something. Often, for their criminal purposes, they use not technical skills, but social ones. There is such a thing as social engineering, and now I will explain what it is. This is when fraudsters lure information or even money from people by posing as someone else, or simply gaining trust.
The most common telephone scam, when you allegedly receive a call from a bank security officer, is real social engineering. This person will tell you that he sees a strange transaction on your account, and to cancel it, he needs to tell him your user number and password, and then the verification code from the SMS. Many people fall for this and happily give their data to fraudsters. This is social engineering.
Hackers working on this system can, for example, come to the office of some large company and say that they are technical support workers who were called by someone from the office to fix computers, modems or a printer. Administrators and security guards can easily let such a person into the office, and there he will calmly get physical access to the computers he needs and do whatever he needs, for example, steal some information or install malware.
Or, for example, a hacker can send your friend on Instagram, Facebook or Vkontakte a message that will offer to register in a service that helps to boost likes on posts for free and safely. Your friend will follow the link in the message, and there he will be asked to enter his login and password for the account so that the likes service can start working. And it is quite possible that your friend will enter this data.
The hacker will get them and will be able to log into your friend's account. This method is called phishing. After that, the hacker will read your correspondence with your friend to have an idea of what you communicate with him about and how. The hacker will write you a message from your friend's account and ask some personal question, for example, how is your mother doing at her new job. You will answer, and then he will ask you to transfer him some money as a loan to some left account.
And, most likely, you will fall for it, because you will not even understand that a complete stranger is writing to you. Although I hope that my subscribers, of course, will not fall for this. So, it turns out that the hacker took over your friend's account and took over your money, while he did not hack anything at all and did not infect your computer with a virus. But such hackers can use social engineering in conjunction with malware.
For example, he will gain access to your friend's account through a phishing email, after which he will send you a link from his account, which will contain a malicious program that will send the hacker screenshots from your phone. Thus, the hacker will get your user number at the bank when you log in to the application. The hacker will call the bank, introduce himself as you and give your user number. Let's say he does not know the password, but in such cases, you can sometimes just answer the security question.
Security questions are often very simple, for example, the name of a pet or mother's maiden name. You can get this information simply by combing through your social networks. And it is quite possible that the hacker will be able to guess the answer to the secret question and gain access to your account. Therefore, be careful, never disclose your personal information to anyone, do not use simple answers to secret questions and create complex passwords. There are more and more bans in Russia, most likely, YouTube will also be blocked in the future.
However, this is not the end of the world, it will still be possible to watch YouTube through a VPN. Now is the time to think about purchasing a good VPN service for your digital freedom and security. But let's get back to the topic of hackers and passwords. I think you've often encountered the fact that when registering on some site you are asked to come up with a complex password with different symbols, a number and a capital letter.
This may annoy you. However, this is done for a reason, but for your own safety. I'll tell you the story of one unusual hacker. His name is Marcel Lazar Lehel. His nickname was Gucifer. He was a Romanian taxi driver, and he did not have hacking skills in the usual sense of the word. That is, he did not know how to hack or write viruses. He was busy reading Wikipedia articles about various celebrities and politicians, and then hacking their emails.
He did it very simply. He tried to guess the answer to the secret question to reset the password, based on the information he knew about his victim. Or he simply tried to guess the password, knowing the date of birth, names of children and pets, favorite movies of his victim, and so on. So, he managed to gain access to the mail of dozens of famous people - musicians, actors and politicians.
For example, he was able to gain access to the mail of the assistant of former US President Bill Clinton - Sidney Blumenthal, after which he distributed letters and personal notes of this woman on the Internet. He also managed to find these pictures in the mailbox of another politician - self-portraits of another former US President George W. Bush. He drew himself in the shower. Gucifer also gained access to the mail of some politicians from his native Romania, after which he also published secret data from their correspondence.
In the end, he was caught first in Romania and sentenced to prison, and then sentenced to prison in the United States too. He was extradited there from Romania to serve his sentence. In such a simple way, with only patience and a lot of free time, he became one of the most famous hackers in the world, without having any special computer skills. So I will say it again - use complex passwords, use two-factor authentication and non-trivial answers to secret questions.
Most often, hackers use their knowledge for selfish purposes in order to make money. But there is such a thing as hacktivism, that is, hacker activism, when hackers - supporters of a particular ideology - use their skills to protest against something or to sabotage for ideological reasons.
For example, they attack websites of the government of totalitarian countries, websites of large corporations, religious sects, and so on. The most famous and public such group of their activists is the organization Anonymous. I am sure that you have all heard of it and seen their main symbol, the white mask from the movie V for Vendetta. In this film, the main character fought against a totalitarian state and wore such a mask all the time.
So, hackers from Anonymous also wear such a mask during video messages and in general just as a symbol, for example, at street protests, but of course not all those who go to protests in such masks are actually hackers and members of this group. This organization does not have any center or main management, these are just hackers from all over the world, united by a common idea. It is difficult to attribute any specific political ideology to Anonymous, but they are closest to libertarians.
Anonymous stands for freedom of information and against censorship. They stand against war, the growing power of large corporations, and against hatred and enmity. Anonymous has repeatedly attacked various Internet providers for blocking access to pirate sites. They attacked the PayPal payment service, as well as Visa and Mastercard for prohibiting donations to the Wikileaks website.
It collects various secret information leaked by people who work in intelligence agencies and governments of different countries. They attacked the FBI website when they closed a large pirate website. Anonymous also attacked an American sect, the Westbury Baptist Church, which is known for its hatred of gays. Then Anonymous posted LGBT symbols on the sect's website, and turned on gay porn on the sectarians' computers.
Anonymous often record messages like these to organizations they oppose. They use voice generators for voiceovers. There have also been cases where some members of this group were caught by the secret services and then arrested. In general, the Anonymous are fighting for everything good against everything bad. However, judging by everything, they are fierce conspiracy theorists. They have a channel on YouTube with over three million subscribers.
So this channel is a real branch of the REN-TV channel, where they talk about what types of aliens there are, how aliens abduct people, about reading thoughts, astral travel, UFOs in the service of the Pentagon and all that stuff. The videos have names like "America is hiding something terrible" or "Nobody can explain it." Either hackers make money from views, or they really believe in all this.
Personally, I was even disappointed in this organization when I watched their channel on YouTube. I repeat, not all hackers use their skills for criminal purposes. There is also such a concept as "ethical hacking" or "white hat hackers". These are people who also hack websites, services and programs, but with the goal of warning developers about the vulnerabilities they find. Ethical, or as they are also called "white hat" hackers, are essentially cybersecurity specialists.
They work to make digital products more secure from bad hackers who have bad and evil motives. By the way, many IT companies encourage ethical hackers and pay them for the vulnerabilities they find. To do this, hackers simply have to contact the company and tell in detail about the vulnerability they found. History knows of cases when companies paid more than a hundred thousand dollars for such information. Companies are willing to pay so much to motivate other hackers not to use system vulnerabilities against the company, causing damage to it, but to report them to developers.
One of the most common methods of hacker attacks is a DDoS attack, which is an abbreviation for the English term Distributed Denial of Service. This is when a huge number of computers from different countries send a request to the same server, for example, to some website.
The server cannot handle such a number of requests and simply stops functioning. It would be as if a thousand hooligans ran into McDonald's at the same time and all tried to order something at once, and someone would just ask for salt, a straw or napkins. And it would be impossible to separate real orders from fake ones. But how do hackers do this? It's very simple. Hackers send spam to different people. They send them the same links that you were told not to click on since childhood.
And especially not to download anything from them. However, many people do it anyway out of curiosity. They download malicious files from left links. These files are installed on their system. As a result, the victim's computer becomes part of a so-called botnet, that is, a network of infected computers. Such a program, in principle, may not harm the owner of the infected computer in any way and do nothing special, but when a hacker who controls the botnet decides to make a DDoS attack, he activates this program on all infected computers, after which they simultaneously send requests to a certain server, often disabling it.
On the Darknet, it is very easy to buy such a DDoS attack for cryptocurrency, for example, if you are a bad person and want to disable the site of your competitor or some organization that you do not like. It is not cheap, by the way. It is also worth adding that modern means of protection are improving, and DDoS attacks are becoming more and more difficult to carry out, although it is still possible and quite common.
Among hackers, of course, there are also many people with a good sense of humor. Accordingly, there are hackers who use their skills just for fun, for fun. For example, in 2013, during a TV show on a small American TV channel, this happened. A hacker connected to the video broadcast of this show and superimposed his own audio track on top of it, in which a male voice said that the government was informing all viewers about an emergency, namely, a zombie attack.
Here is the video.
The management of this TV channel did not even file a police report about this attack. They made sure that this attack did not harm anyone, and they themselves had a good time. Well, rightly so. And in 1997, in the UK, in one small town, a video broadcast was also hacked, and an audio track was also superimposed, in which an artificial voice, introducing himself as the commander of the intergalactic fleet Ashtar, told the people of Earth what they needed to do.
Here is a short fragment of this video.
This insert lasted for more than six minutes, during which the voice told people about an impending global catastrophe and that humanity must urgently abandon all nuclear weapons. There is a term, catfishing, this is when a person creates a completely virtual persona for himself on the Internet, that is, he creates an account in one or another social network, but uploads not his own photos, but photos of some young beautiful girl, comes up with a name for her, posts certain things on her behalf, writes comments and communicates with other people, posing as her.
For example, a guy often wrote to me in contact from different accounts of beautiful girls, who wanted me to become interested in the sect he is a member of, apparently to lure me in too. Some people do such things just for fun, creating a virtual life they like, while others do it for criminal purposes for the sake of profit.
Kat Fisher, posing as a young beautiful girl, can, for example, write in private messages to different men on VKontakte or Facebook, start a conversation with them and make them fall in love with her, after which the criminal can quite easily ask such men in love for a loan or just some kind of gift. Kat Fisher can also be a girl, then she can also send voice messages to her victims, strengthening their belief that this is a real person.
Also, such fake girls often tell their male victims about what a rich and successful life they lead, post photos of this, and so on, and then casually tell them that they earned all the money by investing in something, and casually offer the men in love to try themselves in this area too. Many men fall for this, because they believe that this is a real girl who shows sympathy for them.
And if she managed to earn money by investing, then they will succeed too. As a result, the Catfisher sends his victims the address of a website where they need to register and deposit money into their account in order to, for example, buy cryptocurrency. Of course, the website ends up being a scam. And many, apparently, fall for it. But there are also catfishers who do this just for fun, without pursuing the goal of making money on someone.
This could be a lonely person, unpopular with other people, who creates the life for himself on social networks that he really wants to have. Such a person can, for example, take photos of some foreign model from Instagram, create an account on VKontakte with these photos and simply repost stories and photos from Instagram to his VKontakte account every day. Fans will start writing to Cat Fisher, showering him with compliments, asking about his person and life.
And Kat Fisher will answer them and communicate with them, enjoying the attention and popularity. There is a term "doxing" - this is when someone publishes personal information about a person on the Internet in open access, for example, his passport details, phone number, address, and so on. Sometimes these are even publications of scans of documents, such as a passport. The reasons for doxing someone can be different, sometimes it is done for the sake of bullying a person. Unfortunately, bullying on the Internet, the so-called cyberbullying, is a very common thing.
And publishing the victim's personal data is a fairly common practice for this on the Internet. Doxing also happens for the purposes of some kind of lynching. For example, there are groups of activists on the Internet who publish and distribute on the Internet the data of those people who were involved in various scandals or are somehow connected with something controversial. Moreover, doxing is not always associated with hacking. Often doxxers collect all the information about the victim by simply digging around the Internet, collecting information from their victim's social networks, and also communicating with people who are on the victim's friend list.
Often, such people are happy to tell anything even to a random person. What is interesting is that collecting and publishing data about someone is not a crime in itself in most countries, unless it is done for the purpose of blackmail. But let's get back to hackers again. Perhaps, the vast majority of people, when they hear the word hacker, imagine a character in a hood, sitting in a dark room with several monitors.
His face is not visible. Sometimes even hackers are depicted working in front of a computer in a mask. And this is not surprising, because for some reason this image of a hacker was born in cinema and is still supported. It is not clear why a hacker needs to hide his face at home in front of a computer. And it is also unclear why in films the process of hacking by hackers is always depicted in approximately the same way. The men sitting in hoods in front of their computers hit the keys incredibly quickly and even hysterically, typing in some huge amount of code.
Eventually, a message lights up on the screen that says something like "hack successfully completed", and if the hacker has partners, he will definitely tell them on the phone the phrase "I've come in" or "I'm inside". In reality, all this happens completely differently. Hackers do not write thousands of lines of code each time to hack something, and they certainly do not do it so quickly.
Programmers generally do not write code most of the time, pressing keys like stenographers, but think about how to write it and what to write. Most hacker attacks occur automatically, that is, hackers write programs, run them, and these programs themselves automatically search for vulnerabilities for a long time, for example, on different sites, and hackers check the results later. For example, there are programs that simply pick passwords to certain accounts.
Picking a password can take many hours or even days. At the same time, the hacker himself does not participate in this process in any way. He only writes this program or buys it on the Darknet from someone else. Every major country has cybersecurity specialists and hackers who are engaged in espionage, cyberattacks and the prevention of such attacks. This is the reality of the 21st century, the reality of modern confrontation between states.
Now we will talk about hackers from North Korea. In general, the existence of hackers in North Korea may be surprising, because there are very few computers in this country and no public access to the Internet. Only very special people can access it there. However, North Korean hackers exist. Moreover, they are a serious threat to Western countries. In North Korea, young guys with mathematical and technical thinking are regularly selected, after which they are sent to study in China, where they master programming and other computer skills.
They study a lot and diligently, because otherwise they will be shot, and in the end they become high-level specialists. After that, they begin to serve their country on the cyber front. At the same time, North Korean hackers continue to be in China, in a city that is located on the border with the DPRK. This is due to the fact that China has good access to the Internet, while in North Korea everything is bad.
They are engaged in hacker attacks on Western government sites and even private commercial companies. For example, in 2014, hackers disabled many of Sony's services because the company made a comedy called "The Interview," where two Americans posing as journalists go to North Korea to kill Kim Jin-un. North Korean hackers also hack crypto wallets, bank accounts, and so on. And they do this in order to somehow earn money for their poor and destitute country.
It is also interesting that in addition to hackers, North Korea has entire squads of programmers who provide freelance services on Western websites. That is, they take tasks from Western clients, complete them, for example, write some programs, and give the money they receive to their beloved state. Everyone knows about this, since some of these IT specialists and hackers managed to escape from the Chinese cities where they live and move to South Korea to start a new life there.
Have you ever been hacked? If so, please share it in the comments, so write something.
Be reasonable and reasonable, for now.
In this topic, I will tell you about people who commit crimes in the virtual world via the Internet, often causing great damage and remaining undetected and anonymous. These are 10 interesting facts about hackers and cybercrime. When someone talks about hackers, associations with hacking, viruses, trojans and other fairly advanced technical things immediately come to mind.
But hackers do not always use such complex methods to hack something. Often, for their criminal purposes, they use not technical skills, but social ones. There is such a thing as social engineering, and now I will explain what it is. This is when fraudsters lure information or even money from people by posing as someone else, or simply gaining trust.
The most common telephone scam, when you allegedly receive a call from a bank security officer, is real social engineering. This person will tell you that he sees a strange transaction on your account, and to cancel it, he needs to tell him your user number and password, and then the verification code from the SMS. Many people fall for this and happily give their data to fraudsters. This is social engineering.
Hackers working on this system can, for example, come to the office of some large company and say that they are technical support workers who were called by someone from the office to fix computers, modems or a printer. Administrators and security guards can easily let such a person into the office, and there he will calmly get physical access to the computers he needs and do whatever he needs, for example, steal some information or install malware.
Or, for example, a hacker can send your friend on Instagram, Facebook or Vkontakte a message that will offer to register in a service that helps to boost likes on posts for free and safely. Your friend will follow the link in the message, and there he will be asked to enter his login and password for the account so that the likes service can start working. And it is quite possible that your friend will enter this data.
The hacker will get them and will be able to log into your friend's account. This method is called phishing. After that, the hacker will read your correspondence with your friend to have an idea of what you communicate with him about and how. The hacker will write you a message from your friend's account and ask some personal question, for example, how is your mother doing at her new job. You will answer, and then he will ask you to transfer him some money as a loan to some left account.
And, most likely, you will fall for it, because you will not even understand that a complete stranger is writing to you. Although I hope that my subscribers, of course, will not fall for this. So, it turns out that the hacker took over your friend's account and took over your money, while he did not hack anything at all and did not infect your computer with a virus. But such hackers can use social engineering in conjunction with malware.
For example, he will gain access to your friend's account through a phishing email, after which he will send you a link from his account, which will contain a malicious program that will send the hacker screenshots from your phone. Thus, the hacker will get your user number at the bank when you log in to the application. The hacker will call the bank, introduce himself as you and give your user number. Let's say he does not know the password, but in such cases, you can sometimes just answer the security question.
Security questions are often very simple, for example, the name of a pet or mother's maiden name. You can get this information simply by combing through your social networks. And it is quite possible that the hacker will be able to guess the answer to the secret question and gain access to your account. Therefore, be careful, never disclose your personal information to anyone, do not use simple answers to secret questions and create complex passwords. There are more and more bans in Russia, most likely, YouTube will also be blocked in the future.
However, this is not the end of the world, it will still be possible to watch YouTube through a VPN. Now is the time to think about purchasing a good VPN service for your digital freedom and security. But let's get back to the topic of hackers and passwords. I think you've often encountered the fact that when registering on some site you are asked to come up with a complex password with different symbols, a number and a capital letter.
This may annoy you. However, this is done for a reason, but for your own safety. I'll tell you the story of one unusual hacker. His name is Marcel Lazar Lehel. His nickname was Gucifer. He was a Romanian taxi driver, and he did not have hacking skills in the usual sense of the word. That is, he did not know how to hack or write viruses. He was busy reading Wikipedia articles about various celebrities and politicians, and then hacking their emails.
He did it very simply. He tried to guess the answer to the secret question to reset the password, based on the information he knew about his victim. Or he simply tried to guess the password, knowing the date of birth, names of children and pets, favorite movies of his victim, and so on. So, he managed to gain access to the mail of dozens of famous people - musicians, actors and politicians.
For example, he was able to gain access to the mail of the assistant of former US President Bill Clinton - Sidney Blumenthal, after which he distributed letters and personal notes of this woman on the Internet. He also managed to find these pictures in the mailbox of another politician - self-portraits of another former US President George W. Bush. He drew himself in the shower. Gucifer also gained access to the mail of some politicians from his native Romania, after which he also published secret data from their correspondence.
In the end, he was caught first in Romania and sentenced to prison, and then sentenced to prison in the United States too. He was extradited there from Romania to serve his sentence. In such a simple way, with only patience and a lot of free time, he became one of the most famous hackers in the world, without having any special computer skills. So I will say it again - use complex passwords, use two-factor authentication and non-trivial answers to secret questions.
Most often, hackers use their knowledge for selfish purposes in order to make money. But there is such a thing as hacktivism, that is, hacker activism, when hackers - supporters of a particular ideology - use their skills to protest against something or to sabotage for ideological reasons.
For example, they attack websites of the government of totalitarian countries, websites of large corporations, religious sects, and so on. The most famous and public such group of their activists is the organization Anonymous. I am sure that you have all heard of it and seen their main symbol, the white mask from the movie V for Vendetta. In this film, the main character fought against a totalitarian state and wore such a mask all the time.
So, hackers from Anonymous also wear such a mask during video messages and in general just as a symbol, for example, at street protests, but of course not all those who go to protests in such masks are actually hackers and members of this group. This organization does not have any center or main management, these are just hackers from all over the world, united by a common idea. It is difficult to attribute any specific political ideology to Anonymous, but they are closest to libertarians.
Anonymous stands for freedom of information and against censorship. They stand against war, the growing power of large corporations, and against hatred and enmity. Anonymous has repeatedly attacked various Internet providers for blocking access to pirate sites. They attacked the PayPal payment service, as well as Visa and Mastercard for prohibiting donations to the Wikileaks website.
It collects various secret information leaked by people who work in intelligence agencies and governments of different countries. They attacked the FBI website when they closed a large pirate website. Anonymous also attacked an American sect, the Westbury Baptist Church, which is known for its hatred of gays. Then Anonymous posted LGBT symbols on the sect's website, and turned on gay porn on the sectarians' computers.
Anonymous often record messages like these to organizations they oppose. They use voice generators for voiceovers. There have also been cases where some members of this group were caught by the secret services and then arrested. In general, the Anonymous are fighting for everything good against everything bad. However, judging by everything, they are fierce conspiracy theorists. They have a channel on YouTube with over three million subscribers.
So this channel is a real branch of the REN-TV channel, where they talk about what types of aliens there are, how aliens abduct people, about reading thoughts, astral travel, UFOs in the service of the Pentagon and all that stuff. The videos have names like "America is hiding something terrible" or "Nobody can explain it." Either hackers make money from views, or they really believe in all this.
Personally, I was even disappointed in this organization when I watched their channel on YouTube. I repeat, not all hackers use their skills for criminal purposes. There is also such a concept as "ethical hacking" or "white hat hackers". These are people who also hack websites, services and programs, but with the goal of warning developers about the vulnerabilities they find. Ethical, or as they are also called "white hat" hackers, are essentially cybersecurity specialists.
They work to make digital products more secure from bad hackers who have bad and evil motives. By the way, many IT companies encourage ethical hackers and pay them for the vulnerabilities they find. To do this, hackers simply have to contact the company and tell in detail about the vulnerability they found. History knows of cases when companies paid more than a hundred thousand dollars for such information. Companies are willing to pay so much to motivate other hackers not to use system vulnerabilities against the company, causing damage to it, but to report them to developers.
One of the most common methods of hacker attacks is a DDoS attack, which is an abbreviation for the English term Distributed Denial of Service. This is when a huge number of computers from different countries send a request to the same server, for example, to some website.
The server cannot handle such a number of requests and simply stops functioning. It would be as if a thousand hooligans ran into McDonald's at the same time and all tried to order something at once, and someone would just ask for salt, a straw or napkins. And it would be impossible to separate real orders from fake ones. But how do hackers do this? It's very simple. Hackers send spam to different people. They send them the same links that you were told not to click on since childhood.
And especially not to download anything from them. However, many people do it anyway out of curiosity. They download malicious files from left links. These files are installed on their system. As a result, the victim's computer becomes part of a so-called botnet, that is, a network of infected computers. Such a program, in principle, may not harm the owner of the infected computer in any way and do nothing special, but when a hacker who controls the botnet decides to make a DDoS attack, he activates this program on all infected computers, after which they simultaneously send requests to a certain server, often disabling it.
On the Darknet, it is very easy to buy such a DDoS attack for cryptocurrency, for example, if you are a bad person and want to disable the site of your competitor or some organization that you do not like. It is not cheap, by the way. It is also worth adding that modern means of protection are improving, and DDoS attacks are becoming more and more difficult to carry out, although it is still possible and quite common.
Among hackers, of course, there are also many people with a good sense of humor. Accordingly, there are hackers who use their skills just for fun, for fun. For example, in 2013, during a TV show on a small American TV channel, this happened. A hacker connected to the video broadcast of this show and superimposed his own audio track on top of it, in which a male voice said that the government was informing all viewers about an emergency, namely, a zombie attack.
Here is the video.
The management of this TV channel did not even file a police report about this attack. They made sure that this attack did not harm anyone, and they themselves had a good time. Well, rightly so. And in 1997, in the UK, in one small town, a video broadcast was also hacked, and an audio track was also superimposed, in which an artificial voice, introducing himself as the commander of the intergalactic fleet Ashtar, told the people of Earth what they needed to do.
Here is a short fragment of this video.
This insert lasted for more than six minutes, during which the voice told people about an impending global catastrophe and that humanity must urgently abandon all nuclear weapons. There is a term, catfishing, this is when a person creates a completely virtual persona for himself on the Internet, that is, he creates an account in one or another social network, but uploads not his own photos, but photos of some young beautiful girl, comes up with a name for her, posts certain things on her behalf, writes comments and communicates with other people, posing as her.
For example, a guy often wrote to me in contact from different accounts of beautiful girls, who wanted me to become interested in the sect he is a member of, apparently to lure me in too. Some people do such things just for fun, creating a virtual life they like, while others do it for criminal purposes for the sake of profit.
Kat Fisher, posing as a young beautiful girl, can, for example, write in private messages to different men on VKontakte or Facebook, start a conversation with them and make them fall in love with her, after which the criminal can quite easily ask such men in love for a loan or just some kind of gift. Kat Fisher can also be a girl, then she can also send voice messages to her victims, strengthening their belief that this is a real person.
Also, such fake girls often tell their male victims about what a rich and successful life they lead, post photos of this, and so on, and then casually tell them that they earned all the money by investing in something, and casually offer the men in love to try themselves in this area too. Many men fall for this, because they believe that this is a real girl who shows sympathy for them.
And if she managed to earn money by investing, then they will succeed too. As a result, the Catfisher sends his victims the address of a website where they need to register and deposit money into their account in order to, for example, buy cryptocurrency. Of course, the website ends up being a scam. And many, apparently, fall for it. But there are also catfishers who do this just for fun, without pursuing the goal of making money on someone.
This could be a lonely person, unpopular with other people, who creates the life for himself on social networks that he really wants to have. Such a person can, for example, take photos of some foreign model from Instagram, create an account on VKontakte with these photos and simply repost stories and photos from Instagram to his VKontakte account every day. Fans will start writing to Cat Fisher, showering him with compliments, asking about his person and life.
And Kat Fisher will answer them and communicate with them, enjoying the attention and popularity. There is a term "doxing" - this is when someone publishes personal information about a person on the Internet in open access, for example, his passport details, phone number, address, and so on. Sometimes these are even publications of scans of documents, such as a passport. The reasons for doxing someone can be different, sometimes it is done for the sake of bullying a person. Unfortunately, bullying on the Internet, the so-called cyberbullying, is a very common thing.
And publishing the victim's personal data is a fairly common practice for this on the Internet. Doxing also happens for the purposes of some kind of lynching. For example, there are groups of activists on the Internet who publish and distribute on the Internet the data of those people who were involved in various scandals or are somehow connected with something controversial. Moreover, doxing is not always associated with hacking. Often doxxers collect all the information about the victim by simply digging around the Internet, collecting information from their victim's social networks, and also communicating with people who are on the victim's friend list.
Often, such people are happy to tell anything even to a random person. What is interesting is that collecting and publishing data about someone is not a crime in itself in most countries, unless it is done for the purpose of blackmail. But let's get back to hackers again. Perhaps, the vast majority of people, when they hear the word hacker, imagine a character in a hood, sitting in a dark room with several monitors.
His face is not visible. Sometimes even hackers are depicted working in front of a computer in a mask. And this is not surprising, because for some reason this image of a hacker was born in cinema and is still supported. It is not clear why a hacker needs to hide his face at home in front of a computer. And it is also unclear why in films the process of hacking by hackers is always depicted in approximately the same way. The men sitting in hoods in front of their computers hit the keys incredibly quickly and even hysterically, typing in some huge amount of code.
Eventually, a message lights up on the screen that says something like "hack successfully completed", and if the hacker has partners, he will definitely tell them on the phone the phrase "I've come in" or "I'm inside". In reality, all this happens completely differently. Hackers do not write thousands of lines of code each time to hack something, and they certainly do not do it so quickly.
Programmers generally do not write code most of the time, pressing keys like stenographers, but think about how to write it and what to write. Most hacker attacks occur automatically, that is, hackers write programs, run them, and these programs themselves automatically search for vulnerabilities for a long time, for example, on different sites, and hackers check the results later. For example, there are programs that simply pick passwords to certain accounts.
Picking a password can take many hours or even days. At the same time, the hacker himself does not participate in this process in any way. He only writes this program or buys it on the Darknet from someone else. Every major country has cybersecurity specialists and hackers who are engaged in espionage, cyberattacks and the prevention of such attacks. This is the reality of the 21st century, the reality of modern confrontation between states.
Now we will talk about hackers from North Korea. In general, the existence of hackers in North Korea may be surprising, because there are very few computers in this country and no public access to the Internet. Only very special people can access it there. However, North Korean hackers exist. Moreover, they are a serious threat to Western countries. In North Korea, young guys with mathematical and technical thinking are regularly selected, after which they are sent to study in China, where they master programming and other computer skills.
They study a lot and diligently, because otherwise they will be shot, and in the end they become high-level specialists. After that, they begin to serve their country on the cyber front. At the same time, North Korean hackers continue to be in China, in a city that is located on the border with the DPRK. This is due to the fact that China has good access to the Internet, while in North Korea everything is bad.
They are engaged in hacker attacks on Western government sites and even private commercial companies. For example, in 2014, hackers disabled many of Sony's services because the company made a comedy called "The Interview," where two Americans posing as journalists go to North Korea to kill Kim Jin-un. North Korean hackers also hack crypto wallets, bank accounts, and so on. And they do this in order to somehow earn money for their poor and destitute country.
It is also interesting that in addition to hackers, North Korea has entire squads of programmers who provide freelance services on Western websites. That is, they take tasks from Western clients, complete them, for example, write some programs, and give the money they receive to their beloved state. Everyone knows about this, since some of these IT specialists and hackers managed to escape from the Chinese cities where they live and move to South Korea to start a new life there.
Have you ever been hacked? If so, please share it in the comments, so write something.
Be reasonable and reasonable, for now.
