‘Yahoo Boys’ Have 419 Facebook Friends
Summary: A breach of the BestRecovery data theft service exposed roughly 3,000 users, mostly young Nigerian men engaged in dating scams and 419 schemes, and about 280 of them had registered with the same email addresses they used for Facebook. Researchers at George Mason University and Recorded Future mapped those Facebook profiles and found two largely separate, tightly knit networks - one tied to Nigeria (usually Lagos) and one to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - each with a few central leaders and a handful of unconnected middlemen bridging the two.
Why it matters: The operational security failure here was reusing one email address across a criminal service and a personal social account, which let researchers reconstruct the group's leadership and geography from open profiles alone; the same reuse is common among your own users and attackers alike.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
- Related
- TSMC employee data breach linked to cloud provider Cyber Risks · Nov 15, 2026Data Breach at La Poste Subsidiary Maileva Affects 22 Million People in France Cyber Risks · Nov 15, 2026City of Osaka warns of data breach impacting 1 million as Japan reels from dozens of cyber incidents Cyber Risks · Nov 13, 2026