May 14th, 2009
Hacker claims to have phished Steve Jobs Amazon account
Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney was approached by a hacker looking to sell access to Steve Jobs’ personal Amazon account “with all his purchase/interest details for 6-7 years.”
The hacker going by the handle “orin0co” claims to have phished the Apple CEO in a new trend called “whaling” or “spear phishing.” Instead of sending out millions of spam emails, “whaling” instead focuses on trying to phish high-worth victims like well-known CEOs and celebrities.
Jobs has purchased 20,000 items from Amazon.com in the last 10 years, the hacker says. That’s 2,000 items a year, or more than 5 items a day, every day.
If true, a successful phishing/whaling attack on the Apple CEO could prove embarrassing in light of Apple’s position that Mac’s are less susceptible to “viruses, crashes and headaches” which the company touts in its new television commercial “Elimination.”
As proof of the attack “orin0co” includes a screen shot (above) that apparently shows him logged into Jobs’ account. But we all know that it’s easy to fake a screenshot.
The attack has not been confirmed by Apple or by Amazon and there are some questionable parts of the story, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.
—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
Hash: SHA1Hi,
The reason am writing to you is that your book is among first to
sell in amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/steve-jobs-Books/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=Steve%20Jobs&rh=n%3A266239%2Ck%3ASteve%20Jobs&page=1I will try to be as short as possible:
2 years ago, I set a amazon.com fake page, and sent emails to different IT people around the globe. Among some other unknown person, Steve Jobs got my mail, he didn’t notice the scam I set so he “updated” his amazon account with data( name, address, credit card number, phone, amazon user and password) which I received, sent to my mail.
Now, it was not my intention to misuse his account (which is still untouched!), the sole purpose was if the “scam” was so perfect that even IT Guru’s will fall on it.
I saw you are the bestseller with a book on S.Jobs, I still have access on his amazon.com account, with all his purchase/interest details for 6-7 years. Now I just checked again, and he didn’t use it since December 22 last year, for reasons known to us.
I intent to sell this information, that’s why I picked you as first on the list.
If you are not interested, am sure other book authors on SJ life (Jeffrey Young, William Simon, Alan Deutschman, Anthony Imbimbo, Daniel Lyons or any others) will be very interested to know about this.
Hope to hear from you,
Regards
p.s. I can provide “print screens” logged in SJ amazon account.
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
Subscribe to The Apple Core via Email alerts or RSS.
