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Vacation is not just a break, it is a strange state of mind when you want to try everything at once. Especially when it's Greece, Vai Beach...
A beautiful, wild date palm grove covering an area of 250 square kilometers! A real palm forest consisting of 5,000 date palms. What's more, it's quick and easy to get there from either Agios Nikolaos or Sitia. It all started with a random letter in the mail...
At first, I even thought it was spam, but the text was such that I reread it several times. Then I got ready as quickly as I could.
I only managed to take the bare essentials that fit into my old backpack: sunglasses, an old, worn-out laptop, a small notebook, and my dreams, written down in ballpoint pen. Then events unfolded very quickly: the plane, the heat, the sea, Greece, Vai Beach. I didn't even notice...
I spent the night in a hut with a palm leaf roof. At night I heard the sound of the sea, and in the morning I was awakened by a beautiful breeze. It was probably then that I decided that every summer should be special for me.
One evening, sitting on the sand, I looked at the sea and thought: "The people here are completely different — calmer, slower, friendlier, and always smiling... And they have no idea that a whole bunch of cryptos, which can be converted into money, are being transferred to anonymous accounts. But who could have imagined that $243 million could be transferred so quickly?"
At that time, I had no idea that in a week's time, all the major publications would be writing about how a 13-year-old teenager had discovered a critical vulnerability that allowed him to take complete control of groups in Teams. About how he found a workaround through Outlook and, in fact, hacked Microsoft Teams. In addition, he may be involved in the large-scale theft of 4,100 BTC. Although he agreed to cooperate with law enforcement, he did not admit guilt in fraud and conspiracy to launder money.
On the same day, online publications began to reveal details of his personal life: his fascination with programming in elementary school, Scratch, and HTML. They wrote about how, in fifth grade, he analyzed the code of educational platforms and tested their limits, and how he mastered the basics of security research.
In reality, however, the scheme was different. It consisted of conducting an online attack using conventional social engineering.
One of us sent victims fake messages about attempts to access their crypto accounts. The other two, meanwhile, called them pretending to be technical support employees of the companies. In most cases, this allowed us to gain control of the accounts and obtain the password or private WIF key.
Vacation is not just a break, it is a strange state of mind when you want to try everything at once. Even if it's a little scary...
