Social Media Crimes — 2

Methodology from Case studies:

From part 1 of Social Media Crimes, you might have got some idea about the various types of crimes, attacks are done on and from Social Media. In this part, we will read and identify how such cases can be traced by normal users.

Case1: This case is not official nor we did any FIR because practically we tried to solve this on our own. One of my college friends called me in the morning and told me that his Facebook and Instagram accounts were hacked. I was shocked by listening to this, then he told that some posts were shared from his account about the sales of goggles and a website was mentioned in it which was: www.rbaac.com

Immediately we took some precautionary steps which everyone should follow:

• Reported the posts to Instagram from my account or any other friend’s account.
• Change the password up to 25 characters with a combination of letters, alphanumeric characters.
• Checked the account visibility and if found suspicious then log out from there.

Now, we have done these steps but we wanted to know about the culprit or attacker. So we started doing Information Gathering from Open Sources.

To do this you don’t have to install anything.

• The website www.rbaac.com we first checked this site by actually going in it.
• There is a website https://whois.domaintools.com/ where you just have to paste the website name and then it shows the information about its domain, its creation date & time, company’s phone number, location of this website, and much more.
• Again if you want to see how the website was looking earlier and its contents then https://archive.org/web/ this website is named as “Wayback machine”. This will show the screenshots of the earlier pages included on the website.
• If you want to see if a website is blacklisted or not then a wonderful tool is available https://mxtoolbox.com/ name as “MxToolbox”. You got various options in it.

Then we go through its Facebook account where we found that the same posts were shared from his Facebook account too. So we started searching for the activities that might be done.

Then we found that from his Facebook account the hacker has created the campaign where he is using his account to collect money from his friends. Then the same procedures we did for the Facebook account and checked the timeline again after 4–5 days.

Now there are no such activities and he is safe & clean now.

So, the point of this case study was to ensure if any such activity happens with anyone, what precautionary steps you should take, and by not panicking one must do Information gathering also.