A US security website has released a video
the facebook profiles of some Nigerian
Scammers.
They were able to do that because these
guys used the same email addresses they
used in opening their real facebook profiles
in Scamming.
The report was published on http://
krebsonsecurity.com/
Earlier this week, I wrote about an online
data theft service that got hacked. That
compromise exposed a user base of mostly
young Nigerian men apparently engaged in
an array of cybercrime activities — from
online dating scams to 419 schemes.
It turned out that many of these guys
signed up for the data theft service using
the same email address they used to
register their Facebook accounts. Today’s
post looks at the social networks between
and among these individuals.
Of the nearly 3,000 BestRecovery users,
about 280 of them had Facebook accounts
tied to their BestRecovery email addresses.
George Mason University associate
professor Damon McCoy and several of his
grad students volunteered to scrape those
profiles that were open and map their
social networks to see if there were any
obvious or discernible patterns in the data.
The raw data itself —
which ranked the
BestRecovery users
on number of connections they had to
other users — was potentially useful, but
difficult to parse into meaningful chunks.
Oddly enough, as
I was poring over that data I heard from
Chris Ahlberg, the CEO of Recorded Future
Inc., a Cambridge, Mass. software company
that specializes in Web intelligence and
predictive analytics. Ahlberg was writing to
say that he enjoyed the blog — particularly
the posts with data-intensive analyses —
and that he’d be delighted to collaborate
on a data-rich research project at some
point. I told him his timing couldn’t have
been more serendipitous.
Ahlberg and his team took the raw scraped
data sets from the Facebook accounts and
ran it through their cyber intelligence
applications. In short order, they produced
some very compelling and beautiful graphs.
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