CYBER SECURITY — Grant Smith, founder and president of Phantom Security Group, made it his mission to track down the group responsible for tricking his "very, very smart" and tech-savvy wife with faked U.S. Postal Service texts.
The "smishing" group that Smith cracked resulted in recovering data from more than 390,000 distinct credit cards..
Smith says the lesson here is in how ubiquitous the scammers are..
Smith, who lives in Andover, Mass., says that last year around the holidays, his wife was in a rush when she received just such a message. She knew she had packages being delivered — so she quickly filled out her address and billing information on the very official-looking website. And almost instantly she realized she’d done the wrong thing. “Right afterwards, she had a second to think,” Smith says..
Smith, who recently graduated from Virginia Tech, was on winter break and decided he would try to find out who was behind the scam. It only took a few weeks to pinpoint and hack into a Chinese-language system supporting the tricksters, he says, and then a few more months to gather up the personal data that had been stolen. He handed his findings over to the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and an unnamed U.S. bank... people.com
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