by Michael Scott
There are hidden hacker groups that are paid money to hack your computer and steal all your personal data. Anyone can be attacked by these stealth hackers. The high profile case of Mr. Haephrati shined light on this dark underworld.
Michael Haephrati, a computer programmer, originally created the Trojan to spy and harass his former in-laws. It was his method of revenge. His wife, Ruth Brier-Haephrati saw the business opportunity in selling this capability to other people and firms.
Haephratis subscribers could target any individual or business they wanted to steal intellectual property from. The data stolen was secret correspondence, economic data, and documents.
Here is how they did it.
Between May 2003 and May 2005 a psychological hook was delivered to a specific individual. The targeted individual received an email from an address that looked like a known associate. The hook delivered by email was of a lucrative business opportunity. When the target responded to the email their computer received a Trojan from info@targetdata.biz. If the target did not respond to the email, the target would later receive a CD in the mail that contained the psychological hook again with the Trojan hidden in the programming code.
The Trojan was part key-logger, part remote access exploit, and part copy and send FTP software. The key-logger portion would record keystrokes. The remote access exploit allowed anyone to watch what a person was doing on their computer in real time. The FTP portion of the Trojan would scan, copy, and send files to more than a dozen servers located around the world.
According to Israeli police, items stolen included business plans, marketing plans, details on new products in the making, and employee information and pay slips. This information was then sold to competitors of the target. Israeli police said that over 11 gigabytes of confidential data was obtained before they shut it down.
People who subscribed to Haephrati gained economic advantage of competitors.
A subscription to Haephratis didn’t come cheap. Haephratis charged a business customer $3,500 (U.S. dollars) to create a customized software program and to make the initial install on the victim’s computer. The monthly fee was then $900 to maintain the infrastructure used to collect, store, and forward the secretly acquired data on a monthly basis.
The cost to victims of Haephrati’s were huge. They lost their best marketing plans, new secret products in the pipe-line they were working on, and even lost the trust of their employees’ because of stolen employees’ personal data. All of this theft was facilitated by what are known as underground servers. The following price list was found on underground servers in 2007.
U.S.-based credit card with card verification value $1 – $6 UK-based credit card with card verification value $2 – $12 An identity (including U.S. bank account, credit card, date of birth, and government-issued identification number) $14 – $18 List of 29,000 e-mails $5 Online banking account with a $9,900 balance $300 Yahoo Mail cookie exploit”advertised to facilitate full access when successful $3 Valid Yahoo and Hotmail e-mail cookies $3 Compromised computers $6 – $20 Phishing Web site hosting”per site $3 – $5 Verified PayPal account with balance (balance varies) $10 – $50 Unverified PayPal account with balance (balance varies) $12 Skype accounts $12 World of Warcraft accounts”one month duration $10
All Haephrati had to do to become rich was to just quietly keep doing what he was doing. But he couldn’t do that. For all his computer smarts, he lacked relationship smarts. He was not content with pulling in tens of thousands of dollars each month, instead he continued to harass his former in-laws. He would steal their private data and post it publicly on the Internet in an attempt to defame his father-in-law’s person and character. His former father-in-law finally went to the police.
The police were able to trace the Trojan back to Haephrati’s business by using their own anti-hacker computer forensic tools.
In 2005, Haephrati and his wife were extradited from the UK to Israel and pled guilty to the charges of economic and industrial espionage.
Rumor has it that a secret deal was reached between Haephrati and the Israel Intelligence Agency and they were set free. The deal involves Haephrati now using his Trojan software for law enforcement agencies.
About the Author:
By Michael Scott. To read and learn more about how to be your own private detective visit
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