Hackers devise new online tricks

Nneoma Okwuonu, a student of University of Uyo, got home from classes one afternoon, after an exhaustive marathon of lectures. Just as she was contemplating what to have for lunch, she heard a beep from her phone.

She opened the message, which turned out to be a notification from her friend on Facebook. The message asked her to click on a particular link and learn how to make fast money without stress. She clicked on the link, and was redirected to another website, where she signed up on the business portal to begin the process of making money.

Concerned about the welfare of her friends, she sent the link to them, so that they could also make the ‘cool cash’ which she was about to make. A few minutes later, she got a notification that her account had been compromised.

“A trusted friend sent a link to me, inviting me to click on it to make money. I was referring my friends on Facebook to ‘like’ and open the link too. After about two minutes, I saw a pop-up message on my screen which read: ‘Your Facebook account has been phished,” Okwuonu said.

“I could not access my account. The hacker barred me from using it till date, and the worst is that he is still manipulating that account,” she stated.

For Light Nwankwo, who is a marketing executive with a bank in Port Harcourt, he woke up one morning to see an unusual electronic mail message from his uncle, asking him to lend him some money.

Nwankwo said, “I got an electronic message from my uncle, Augustine Udeh, saying he had a car waiting at the wharf for clearance and needed about $1000 to clear it. Knowing that he could not ask me for such, I called him to tell him that his account had been hacked. He had to change the password, but almost immediately, they gained access to it again and sent viral messages to all his contacts.”

Udeh, who was a former top  government employee, risked having his information and government secrets  divulged to the hackers.

About three weeks ago, a Lagos State University graduate allegedly cloned the Facebook accounts of the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; wife of the Lagos State Governor, Abimbola Fashola; wife of the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Aisha Bala Muhammed; and the Director, Abuja Geographical Information Systems, Jamilah Tangaza, and used these accounts to solicit money.

Also, a young man was arrested recently for allegedly impersonating a monarch on Facebook. He was arrested when he went to withdraw some money from one of his victims.

According to a social media expert, Femi Lawore, social network accounts are mostly hacked through phishing.

“Victims get a mail or a post on their walls telling them to view something of interest on social media through a link. When they click on the link, it tells them to sign into their social network account or a social media application. Usually, these links do not lead to the real social media page.  When they submit their social network login credentials, they are submitting it to hackers.

“Another popular way to have social media accounts hacked is to use unsecured Internet connections or computers (virus or malware infected computers). Through this, hackers can hijack sessions and even lock the user out or change their passwords, sniff unencrypted passwords and have it sent to them through that same system, unknown to the computer user,” he said.

He added that some people reveal too much about themselves on social media making their passwords guessable.

Similarly, Sobowale Temiloluwa, a digital risk management consultant, said online identity theft is the fastest growing area of social media scam. “First is social hacking, where a person hacks into social network accounts and starts soliciting funds from the victim’s friends,” he said.

According to him, soliciting is done in such a genuine way that the victim’s friends will come to his aid not knowing his identity had been stolen.

“The second is through a duplicate identity where a hacker creates another profile or page like the victim’s and uses all his information (picture, school, date of birth etc). The hacker then looks for people on the network that have similar information and adds them. Friends unaware of this scam accept friend requests from the hacker, then the impersonation and solicitation begins,” he added.

The Lagos State Police Public Relations Officer, Ngozi Braide, said the police have been making arrests relating to impersonation and social media crime, but she did not give specific statistics.

She said the Special Fraud Unit is mostly in charge of making these arrests and charging the suspects to court.

Government has made several attempts to stop cyber crime. In 2005, ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, set up a 15-member committee to design solutions for Internet fraud and cyber-crime. The committee came up with a Draft Cyber-crime Act, and also formed the Nigerian Cyber-crime Working Group to accelerate the implementation of the research and assist the National Assembly in the passage of the Cyber-crime bill.

In 2013, the Federal Executive Council approved a draft bill for control and dictation of cyber-crime. The core objective of the bill is to provide an effective framework for the prohibition, prevention, detection and prosecution of cyber-crimes in Nigeria. The cyber-crime bill recommends jail term as punishment upon conviction, for Internet fraudsters. This has generated controversy in the online community as many Nigerians have said the bill was too harsh.

A digital media expert, Gbenga Ogunmuyiwa, however said it was a welcome development, adding that government should not persecute  social media critics if the bill becomes law.