Hackers Posing as Police Convinced Apple and Meta to Share Basic Subscriber Info
A group of hackers known as Recursion Team has reportedly been involved in a 2021 scheme that convinced Meta and Apple to share basic customer data.
The whole thing was possible after the hackers posed as law enforcement officials, with a report from Bloomberg revealing that both Apple and Meta shared information like customer addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses following emergency data requests (which don’t typically require a court order).
The obtained data could be used for various harassment campaigns, but needless to say, it could be employed for a wide variety of other schemes, including financial fraud.
Apple hasn’t confirmed the report for Bloomberg, but Meta provided a statement suggesting it’s already working with law enforcement on the case.
“We review every data request for legal sufficiency and use advanced systems and processes to validate law enforcement requests and detect abuse. We block known compromised accounts from making requests and work with law enforcement to respond to incidents involving suspected fraudulent requests, as we have done in this case,” the company said in a statement.
No statement from Apple
While it didn’t offer a statement on the matter, Apple pointed to its law enforcement guidelines to suggest that the company typically reaches out to government agencies to check if the emergency requests are legitimate.
Very little information is available on Recursion Team, but it’s believed that one of the members could be none other than the founder of Lapsus$, the group that managed to hack tech giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Samsung. Cybersecurity experts believe they are based in the United States and the United Kingdom, but for now, no solid proof in this regard has been found.
In addition to Meta and Apple, it seems Snap has also been targeted with similar requests from hackers, but at this point, it’s not known if the company shared any information or not.
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