Who says that hacking requires a list if sophisticated software and tricks to break into other people systems, all you need is to call the customer support and provide a couple of deceptive answers to easy security questions and that’s it.
It seems hard to swallow, however, that is, how a hacker got access to 23-year-old Aaron Thompson’s Facebook account.
As Fusion reports, Thompson found out on Monday that he couldn’t log into his Facebook account and even the email address and phone numbers that were associated with it had been changed. That was when the panicked Thompson checked out his email and figured out what happened.
What was found was a series of email between Facebook’s customer support and the hacker who had gotten control of his account.
“Hi. I don’t have anymore access on my mobile phone number. Kindly turn off code generator and login approval from my account. Thanks,” the hacker, who posed as Thompson and pretended to have lost access to the phone linked to the account, told Facebook.
Facebook’s automated response then informed the hacker that if he couldn’t get in by using Code Generator, then the only other way was to send a photo ID as an identity prove that this was really Aaron Thompson.
The hacker then sent a scanned photo of a fake passport, said Thompson. None of the details other than the name in the passport, were accurate, informed Thompson.
However, it was enough to convince Facebook’s or in other words enough to make a fool of the world largest social media platform customer support, which then disable all the security mechanisms on Thompson’s account and give access to the hacker, reported MOTHERBOARD.
“Thanks for verifying your identity. You should now be able to log into your account,” a Facebook support employee wrote in an email. “We’ve also turned off login approvals to help prevent you from getting locked out of your account again in the future.”
The frustrated Thompson who was not able to get back into his account went to Reddit to explain his frustration. However, the good news is that Facebook realized the mistake and the company had secured Thompson’s accounts and pages, and is working to reestablish his regular access.
“Accepting this ID was a mistake that violated our own internal policies and this case is not the norm,” the Facebook spokesperson said.
Comments
Comments are closed.