A 20-year old French hacker has been arrested for stealing about 500,000 euros ($651,000) from approximately 17,000 people using malware embedded in software apps. The hacker worked out of his parents home since 2011, designing free apps that were similar in appearance to popular ones. These clone apps sent text messages to premium-rate numbers without the user’s knowledge and recorded sign-in information for gaming and gambling websites, neither of which are unusual techniques. The BBC reports that after his arrest in Amiens, the hacker admitted his crimes and claimed that he wasn’t in it for the money, but acted out of “a love of computers and an ambition to be a software developer.”
Hacker arrested in France for stealing about 500,000 euros using malware apps
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