18-year-old Himanshu Sharma managed to recover the account in less than 24 hours

May 1, 2012 07:45 GMT  ·  By
Zaain Ul Abideen si grateful to the hacker that recovered his Facebook account
   Zaain Ul Abideen si grateful to the hacker that recovered his Facebook account

The famous Pakistani singer Zaain Ul Abeedin recently found that his Facebook page was taken over by a cybercriminal. Authorities failed to help the celebrity so he turned to ethical hacker Himanshu Sharma, who in less than 24 hours managed to recover the account.

This is not the first time when a celebrity’s social media account is hijacked, but this time the hacker didn’t phish his credentials as in most of the other scenarios. Instead, the cybercrook relied on the zero day vulnerability in Hotmail to gain access to his email account, from which he was able to reset the passwords.

According to Zaain, the ill-intended hacker who breached his social media account started urging his friends to Like another Facebook page, but didn’t cause any other damage.

It’s believed that, most likely, this was a case of sabotage ordered by the competition with the purpose of ruining the reputation of Zaain.

So how did he manage to regain his accounts?

Initially, the star went to Pakistani authorities to report the crime, but they couldn’t help him so they suggested that he contact the ethical hacker Ankit Fadia.

In the end, Zaain and his manager contacted another well-known ethical hacker, Himanshu Sharma, or нα¢кєя. Only 18 years of age, Himanshu is already famous for finding security holes in the sites owned by Apple, Google, Microsoft and even Facebook.

The security expert not only managed to recover the Facebook account, but he was also able to track down the hacker’s location and phone number.

“It was a hard task the hacker left almost no trace , but i was lucky enough to find a keylogger posted by him online which upon some reverse engineering took me to the hacker,” Himanshu said.

The attacker's identity was not made public, but the point is that he was stopped before he could cause any serious damage.

Zaain made this story public because he felt that ethical hackers are not as appreciated as they should be.

On the other hand, we wanted to highlight once again that hackers are not all bad. White hats and ethical hackers are the ones that keep everything in balance, making sure that profit-driven cybercriminals can’t go too far with their wrongdoings.