Meta files lawsuit to uncover phishing scams

Meta (formerly known as Facebook), announced that they filed a lawsuit in California court to take action, to discover the individuals running phishing scams. They say the legal action aims to stop phishing attacks that are made to trick people into giving up their Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp login information.

Phishing attacks are made, to lure unsuspecting victims to websites that are made to look legitimate, but are fake.

They persuade victims into writing down personal information, like passwords and e-mail adresses.

Meta said they found more than 39.000 websites that are impersonating the login page of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The attacks are increasing, and is the reason for filing the lawsuit.

“On these websites, people were prompted to enter their usernames and passwords, which Defendants collected,” Jessica Romero, Meta’s director of platform enforcement and litigation, wrote in a blog post. “As part of the attacks,

Defendants used a relay service to redirect internet traffic to the phishing websites in a way that obscured their attack infrastructure. This enabled them to conceal the true location of the phishing websites, and the identities of their online hosting providers and the defendants.”

Meta has started working with relay services, to suspend thousands of URLs that hosted t he phishing websites. They plan to continue collaborations with online service providers, to halter phishing attacks.

It states that it's working to proactively block instances of abuse to the security community, domain name registrars and others.

It isn't the first time Meta has cracked down on phishing. Meta has previusly taken action against four several groups of hackers from Syria and Pakistan.

Meta took action against similar hackers in Bangladesh and vietnam in 2020.