Kashmir Hill reports:
In February, an Alabama woman named Terri went on a hacker-for-hire website called Hacker’s List, and posted a job she needed done.
“I need to get information off an iPhone6, mainly texts (current and deleted if possible and the call log),” she wrote. “Or get into their email account … Thanks so much!”
When Terri made the request on Hacker’s List, which had been written about in the New York Times the month before as a way to “get some espionage done,” she probably didn’t realize that the request would later be publicly associated with her name, phone number and address.
[…]
After the New York Times unmasked the website founder last week, a “white hat hacker” and army vet based in Colorado, security researcher Jonathan Mayer decided to give the site a closer look. He wanted to see how a hacker economy operates, so he created a website crawler to gather data about what kind of projects were being posted and how much hackers were bidding on them. The crawl turned up something else as well though: the accounts on the site were supposedly pseudonymous, but Mayer was quickly able to link people’s identities to many of the listings, including their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and Facebook profiles.
And then he posted it all.
Read more on Fusion.