Hacker Uses Premium Rate Calls To Steal From Instagram, Google, Microsoft (helpnetsecurity.com)

Reader Orome1 writes: Some account options deployed by Instagram, Google and Microsoft can be misused to steal money from the companies by making them place phone calls to premium rate numbers, security researcher Arne Swinnen has demonstrated. Swinnen calculated that, in theory, these options would allow an attacker to milk over 2 million euro per year from Instagram, 432,000 euro per year from Google, and nearly 700,000 euro from Microsoft by using a slew of fake accounts, multiple premium numbers, and different tools and approaches to automate the process.

Comments

Click bait

[ITRambo]

The story explains how the proof of concept exploit could work. It is tedious and was not likely to be used by sane people. The guy was awarded $2000 for discovering the loophole.

How much to do this legally?

[gurps_npc]

As in, I would love to get a phone number that is 'premium' and then give it out to every website that keeps asking for a phone number.

Slime keep trying to steal my privacy in exchange for nothing. They abuse the phone number and have no business asking for it. If they want my phone so badly, then PAY every time you call me. After all, I never want you to call me, so why shouldn't you pay to talk to me?