Amazon Account of Apple’s CEO Intruded

A hacker has claimed that he has hacked the Amazon.com account of the CEO of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs, and accessed his credit card details and entire purchase history. Now, he is looking forward to sell the hacked account to journalists.

The hacker, asserting himself as "orin0co", stated that he delivered the victim a phishing e-mail which looked official; thereby, making him convinced to login to a spoof Amazon.com site, as reported by SoftSailor on May 14, 2009.

The phisher, apparently, mocked the security of the company by hacking the account of its CEO. The fraudster further stated that the hacking episode of Apple's topmost official is a matter of humiliation for the Apple, particularly as the company boasts itself to be completely protected from viruses, hacking and other sorts of security threats.

Moreover, he hasn't misused the hacked account, thereby making the hacking difficult to detect for both Amazon and Steve Jobs. Meanwhile, Apple has remained silent on this, while Amazon has said that it is unaware of any disturbance caused to his account.

However, the story narrated by orin0co is having some flaws. For instance, there is no solid evidence supporting his claim and some of the people are finding it hard to believe that such a basic phishing scam could trick Steve Jobs.

Besides, the claim of hacker that Jobs placed orders for over 20,000 products in past one decade also appears unrealistic. The height of discrepancy in the hacker's claim can be experienced by the information revealed by him that suddenly, in October 2008, Steve Jobs stopped purchasing products.

According to security experts, the phishing assault was a highly sophisticated form known as "whaling", wherein a well-created e-mail is dispatched to the top officials of the corporate, rather spamming several millions with small-scale e-mail scams. Such type of e-mail usually has a genuine looking content, including complete personal information.

The executives usually receive e-mails purportedly coming from Internal Revenue Service, Federal Trade Commission and Better Business Bureau and so on.

Security firm iDefence has recorded more than 15,000 whaling victims since March 2008. The firm also suspected that the hackers would probably target the banking details to make huge profits.

Related article: Amazon’s Customers Latest Target for Phishers

» SPAMfighter News - 5/27/2009