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by JessB 5749 days ago
So the end game would be to transfer money out of bank accounts and paypal? Is it really that easy to do. Seems like it would leave one hell of a trail.

Whats the end game in stealing domain names and hacking sites. There has got to be a financial motivator somewhere in the chain.

Thanks for the info.

1 comments

Whats the end game in stealing domain names and hacking sites. There has got to be a financial motivator somewhere in the chain.

In the case of the vBulletin hacks, the dozen or so sites hacked were all PR4 and above. The guess the idea there is that Google crawls these sites regularly, and it would find hundreds of inlinks to the hacker's site, giving him a boost in the rankings.

As far as PayPal and banks go, you're right, it would leave quite a trail if the hacker started sending money to his accounts from yours. Instead, the hacker might log into your PayPal account to get additional info, such as the billing address for each of your credit cards (easy to find under Profile>Credit Cards). He can log into your bank website to find the full credit card number or account numbers and routing numbers along with the billing address, and a nice history of purchases. It would be easy to disguise a fraudulent purchase by making it the same amount as a purchase you regularly make.