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Hacker Cosmo on how he bypassed Google's two-step authentication and stole personal data

Hacker Cosmo on how he bypassed Google's two-step authentication and stole personal data

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After Wired's Mat Honan lost and subsequently recovered his personal data last month, he dove into the world of hackers and found out just how easy it is to obtain account information from a variety of sites.

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Google Authenticator
Google Authenticator

After Wired's Mat Honan lost and subsequently recovered his personal data last month, he dove into the world of hackers and found out just how easy it is to obtain secure account information from a variety of sites. Honan was put in contact with Cosmo, a hacker responsible for a number of high profile attacks as part of hacktivist group UGNazi — hijacking 4Chan's DNS, breaking into the WHMCS billing agency and stealing 500,000 credit card numbers, and posting Mayor Michael Bloomberg's address and social security number online multiple times. The 15-year-old Cosmo explains just a few of the disturbingly simple methods for obtaining personal data from companies like Amazon, Paypal, and Netflix and how he managed to bypass Google's two-step authentication in the full article from Wired.