Google has filed a lawsuit against a China-based group of hackers dubbed the 'Lighthouse Enterprise' over claims it has duped a million victims out of $1 billion in stolen funds across 121 countries. According to The Financial Times, the tech giant hopes to utilize U.S. racketeering and computer fraud laws to take down the websites, domains, and servers that power the illicit operations. The Lighthouse platform advertises its hacking capabilities across numerous public forums, including YouTube and Telegram, with scammers using its services to run campaigns under the guise of names including Gmail and the United States Postal Service.
“Criminals are leveraging the trust and reputation of our brand to lure users into unsafe phishing attacks. The ability to put our engineers and lawyers to work to actually fight on behalf of those users is a necessary thing to do,” Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado told the publication. “It becomes a little bit of a game of whack-a-mole, but we’re actually able to identify the offenders and go after them individually. It should provide a pretty decent ripple effect of a deterrent…by continuing to do this, we make certain types of phishing attacks less desirable.”
