Hackers pretended to be investigating officers at requests from tech companies

Hackers posed last year as law enforcement officers who made official requests for information from tech companies. That happened last year at Apple, Meta, Snap and Discord, among others.

The hackers forged, among other things, the signatures of employees of investigative services who make such requests, reports Bloomberg. They also made the requests look as real as possible. The hackers tried to get private information about users of those companies in this way, the financial news agency claims.

Meta, Apple and Discord honored those requests and sent information, the news agency said. This is not known from Snap. All companies have verification methods to check if the information requests are genuine, but apparently the hackers didn’t get it. It is believed to be teenagers from the United States and the United Kingdom.

This includes physical addresses, IP addresses and phone numbers of users of Meta, Apple and Discord. It is unknown how many users are involved. Usually such requests concern information about a small number of users for use in criminal investigations. Major tech companies receive such requests on a daily basis.