Security News > 2021 > December > Meta sues people behind Facebook and Instagram phishing
Meta has filed a federal lawsuit in California court to disrupt phishing attacks targeting Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp users.
The attackers behind these phishing campaigns used almost 40,000 phishing pages that would impersonate the four platforms' login pages.
"This phishing scheme involved the creation of more than 39,000 websites impersonating the login pages of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp," said Jessica Romero, Meta's Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation.
The defendants used a relay service to prevent defenders from detecting and blocking their infrastructure by redirecting internet traffic to the phishing sites, thus concealing both the identities of their online hosting providers and the phishing sites' locations.
Once the attacks picked up in March 2021, Facebook worked with the relay service used by the phishing operation to suspend thousands of the landing pages used in the attacks.
In March 2020, Facebook sued domain name registrar Namecheap and its Whoisguard proxy service "For registering domain names that aim to deceive people by pretending to be affiliated with Facebook apps," frequently being used "For phishing, fraud and scams."