Type of site | Internet forum |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Founder(s) | "Ace" [1] |
Advertising | Yes |
Commercial | Yes |
Registration | Optional (required to participate) |
Launched | April 2017; 7 years ago [2] |
OGUsers (OGU) [3] is an Internet forum that facilitates the discussion and buying of social media accounts and online usernames. [4] [5] Established in 2017, the website is dedicated to the buying and selling of "rare" or "OG" online accounts that are considered valuable due to their name or age. [6] The website acts as a platform for cybercrime and the harassment of individuals for access to their online accounts. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] Several high-profile incidents have been linked to the forum, most notably the 2020 Twitter account hijacking. [12]
The site has been linked to various SIM swap scams, where discussion took place on identity theft methods to change login information for online accounts. [13] [14]
Graham Ivan Clark, regarded as the "mastermind" behind the 2020 Twitter account hijacking, was a former member of the forum. [15] Two participants, Mason Sheppard and Nima Fazeli, acted as brokers in selling of Twitter handles on the website. [16]
In 2020, a man from Tennessee died from a heart attack from a swatting. An individual in the United Kingdom was attempting to coerce the man for an online username by utilizing tactics of the site, with him later being sentenced to five years in prison. [17] [18]
The website was hacked in May 2019, with the administrator of RaidForums uploading the database of the website for anyone to access. [19] In December 2020, the website was hacked again with user data being stolen. [20]
Brian Krebs, an American journalist and investigative reporter known for the coverage of cybercriminals, has described the forum as a place "overrun with shady characters who are there mainly to rip off other members." [11] In his report, he described how Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter have taken steps to crack down on users of the forum involved in the trafficking of hijacked accounts. [21] Facebook told Krebs that the forum uses various tactics, such as harassment, intimidation, hacking, coercion, extortion, sextortion, SIM swapping, and swatting. [11]
Domain hijacking or domain theft is the act of changing the registration of a domain name without the permission of its original registrant, or by abuse of privileges on domain hosting and registrar software systems.
Yahoo! Mail is an email service offered by the American company Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously available with the Yahoo! Small Business brand, before it transitioned to Verizon Small Business Essentials in early 2022. Launched on October 8, 1997, as of January 2020, Yahoo! Mail has 225 million users.
Brian Krebs is an American journalist and investigative reporter. He is best known for his coverage of profit-seeking cybercriminals. Krebs is the author of a daily blog, KrebsOnSecurity.com, covering computer security and cybercrime. From 1995 to 2009, Krebs was a reporter for The Washington Post and covered tech policy, privacy and computer security as well as authoring the Security Fix blog.
The Internet has a long history of turbulent relations, major maliciously designed disruptions, and other conflicts. This is a list of known and documented Internet, Usenet, virtual community and World Wide Web related conflicts, and of conflicts that touch on both offline and online worlds with possibly wider reaching implications.
Instagram is an American photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 32 languages including English, Hindi, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese.
Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.
Lizard Squad was a black hat hacking group, mainly known for their claims of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks primarily to disrupt gaming-related services.
dark0de, also known as Darkode, is a cybercrime forum and black marketplace described by Europol as "the most prolific English-speaking cybercriminal forum to date". The site, which was launched in 2007, serves as a venue for the sale and trade of hacking services, botnets, malware, stolen personally identifiable information, credit card information, hacked server credentials, and other illicit goods and services.
Carding is a term of the trafficking and unauthorized use of credit cards. The stolen credit cards or credit card numbers are then used to buy prepaid gift cards to cover up the tracks. Activities also encompass exploitation of personal data, and money laundering techniques. Modern carding sites have been described as full-service commercial entities.
OurMine is a hacker group that is known for hacking popular accounts and websites, such as Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter accounts. The group often causes cybervandalism to advertise their commercial services, which is among the reasons why they are not widely considered to be a "white hat" group.
TikTok, whose mainland Chinese and Hong Kong counterpart is Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from three seconds to 60 minutes. It can be accessed with a smart phone app.
A SIM swap scam is a type of account takeover fraud that generally targets a weakness in two-factor authentication and two-step verification in which the second factor or step is a text message (SMS) or call placed to a mobile telephone.
On July 15, 2020, between 20:00 and 22:00 UTC, 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were reportedly compromised by outside parties to promote a bitcoin scam. Twitter and other media sources confirmed that the perpetrators had gained access to Twitter's administrative tools so that they could alter the accounts themselves and post the tweets directly. They appeared to have used social engineering to gain access to the tools via Twitter employees. Three individuals were arrested by authorities on July 31, 2020, and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and unauthorized computer access related to the scam.
Many countries have imposed past or ongoing restrictions on the video sharing social network TikTok. Bans from government devices usually stem from national security concerns over potential access of data by the Chinese government. Other bans have cited children's well-being and offensive content such as pornography.
Graham Ivan Clark is an American computer hacker, cybercriminal and a convicted felon regarded as the mastermind behind the 2020 Twitter account hijacking.
Lapsus$, stylised as LAPSUS$ and classified by Microsoft as Strawberry Tempest, is an international extortion-focused hacker group known for its various cyberattacks against companies and government agencies. The group was active in several countries, and has had its members arrested in Brazil and the UK in 2022. According to City of London Police at least two of the members were teenagers.
Antisemitism on social media can manifest in various forms such as emojis, GIFs, memes, comments, and reactions to content. Studies have categorized antisemitic discourse into different types: hate speech, calls for violence, dehumanization, conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.
Namespace security is a digital security discipline that refers to the practices and technologies employed to protect the names and identifiers within a digital namespace from unauthorized access, manipulation, or misuse. It involves ensuring the integrity and security of domain names and other digital identifiers within networked environments, such as the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), software development namespaces and containerization platforms. Effective namespace security is crucial for maintaining the reliability and trustworthiness of brands and their digital services and for preventing cyber threats including impersonation, domain name hijacking or spoofing of digital identifiers like domain names and social media handles.
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