An interesting overview of the hacking services offered by the platform Hacker’s List reveals that hacking Facebook accounts is the most common request.

Last week the colleagues at The Hacker News explained how to exploit a simple trick to take over a WhatsApp account, today they have decided to write a post describing a newborn hacking community.

The experts confirmed that every day they receive several emails requesting instruction on Facebook hacking, nearly 80 percent of the requests come from people that want hack their partner or friend Facebook account.

Everyone is interested in spying on their friend, access their private conversations and reveal their secret relationships. Of course, my colleagues at THN always deny any support for hacking activities, but there are several places on the web where it is possible to pay for hacking service.

I have written a specific post on the hacking communities in the Deep Web explaining which are the hacking services that is possible to acquire, where and how.

Today I decided to introduce you a web portal on the world wide web, named Hacker’s List, that received a lot of popularity in the thanks the media coverage of principal news agency, including the New York Times.

The Hacker’s List website was launched in November 2014, it operates as a platform that make possible to acquire hacking services offered its sellers.

Users can post or bid on a hacking project or task offered in the hacking community..

In the first three months of activity, it received more than 500 hacking jobs.

At the time I’m writing more than 2700 anonymous hacker are offering their services on the website. Prices of hacking services on the Hacker’s List range from $28 to $300, meanwhile full hacking projects range in prices of $100 to $5000.

Like any other hacking community, also the Hacker’s List allows anonymous payments through virtual currency.

Are these services legal?

Hacker’s List claims to offer only “ethical hacking” services as reported in the terms and conditions section.

“use the Service for any illegal purposes, including, without limitation, prostitution and/or solicitation;”

Anyway, it is easy to find the requests for illegal activities in the Hacker’s List. Let’s come back to our original question,  how much cost to hack a Facebook account?

A recent research conducted by the expert Jonathan Mayer demonstrated that several tasks listed on the Hacker’s List are related to illegal activities, including Facebook accounts hack, hacking Gmail passwords, stealing taking over WhatsApp and Messenger accounts.

Below key findings of the study:

• 23% of projects relate to Facebook hacking, often involving a business dispute or jilted romance.
• 14% of projects relate to Google account hacking, also involving a business dispute or jilted romance.
• 8% of projects involve students asking for University’s computer systems to be hacked in order to improve their exam grades.
• 3% of projects involve burying some embarrassing tidbit, essentially an ersatz Right to be Forgotten.

Another disconcerting issue discovered by Mayer is that it is quite possible for anyone to discover the identity of Anonymous clients who are paying for hiring services. It is not related to a flaw in the Hacker’s List platform, instead the bad habit of users to use the same username for multiple websites.

Mayer revealed that by using a web page crawler is simple to collect usernames from Hacker’s List Project pages and then search for them on the web possibly revealing the buyer’s identity and related personal information (i.e. email addresses, contact details and other personal data).

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Hacker’s List , Hacking)