friend's account hacked on Absolute for thousands

[mosta]

A friend of mine who is along time middle limit player (like long before
the online era) just got hacked on Absolute and got taken for several
thousand. They also got into his Paypal and Neteller accounts (but
lost nothing b/c no money in the first and second is frozen). He
primarily uses a laptop but also has a desktop that he hasn't used
in months. He has one roommate who he says he trusts completely
and no one else was in the house--he thinks he's sure.

He says Absolute investigations determined that the activity
came from his IP and his MAC address, corresponding to the
desktop.

How possible is it to fake an IP and MAC for a hacker?? Or does
he need to reconsider who may have been on his desktop?

Note, I think the passwords were not changed after the hack.
On AP the guy lost a lot randomly, seems to have dumped some
to one guy maybe, lost a lot on blackjack, and put in a withdraw
request to a new processor account which they managed to cancel.

[SamIAm]

[ QUOTE ]
He says Absolute investigations determined that the activity
came from his IP and his MAC address, corresponding to the
desktop.

How possible is it to fake an IP and MAC for a hacker?? Or does
he need to reconsider who may have been on his desktop?

[/ QUOTE ]
They probably weren't physically typing on his laptop, just accessed it remotely. Faking the IP is pretty hard.

[ohgeetee]

This is one of those Occam's razor scenarios. did your friend recently download any poker helper type applications? if not, his roommate or someone in his home logged into his account while he wasn't there.

The likelyhood of him being compromised at random by someone not in the house is pretty far out of the realm of reality, if he has not recently downloaded any malicious software.

[Scansion]

Talk to this "trustworthy" roommate I guess.

[patrickf3]

how secure is the network he is using? if the person is on the network itself - it's very easy to use that ip rather than faking it. MAC address is a no brainer to fake.

[BiPolar_Nut]

[ QUOTE ]
MAC address is a no brainer to fake.

[/ QUOTE ]

QFT

[mosta]

Thanks for the comments. He might come and post himself, but until he figures that out I'll just mention: He says he found a key logger with Norton anti-spyware. I told him that that is not proof positive, b/c I've had false positives before. He also was trying to explain to me that he didn't think it was a MAC address but was some other type of physical ID, which he thinks must have been spoofed. I told him that if I can get more specifics, someone might be able to say more definitively whehter all his info could have been faked by a hacker.

[goldtoes]

man this sounds familiar...