A German man has reportedly been arrested after crawling several popular German social-networking sites for data and then allegedly trying to extort the sites' operators.
According to published reports, a 20 year-old man from Erlangen, Germany, was arrested Sunday on extortion charges after threatening to sell data belonging to users of VZ Networks social networking sites, unless he was paid €80,000 (US$120,000).
Some reports have identified the man as 20-year-old "Matthias L"
Founded in 2005, VZ Networks operates three German language social-networking sites that are similar to Facebook: SchulerVZ, StudiVZ, and MeinVZ. It claims more than 15 million users.
The company did not respond to a request for comment on the data theft.
VZ first alerted users to the problem on Friday. The company said that two perpetrators are responsible for the crime, including the man arrested Sunday. According to VZ, the criminals built a site crawler that was able to circumvent the sites' security mechanism and automatically download user's publicly available information their name, school, sex, age, and profile photo.
At first, VZ thought that only the SchulerVZ site had been crawled, but it later said that StudiVZ, MeinVZ had also been hit. StudiVZ, a site for students, was sued by Facebook last year. Facebook claims that the site copies its look and feel.
The VZ hackers did not access information that is not typically available to other users; information such as phone numbers or mailing and e-mail addresses, VZ Networks said.
According to Welt Online the criminals obtained information on more than 1 million users.
In an April 22 YouTube video, a 20-year-old user named matt56444 demonstrated a similar tool, saying he was able to download information on 48,000 users in about four hours.
VZ has now increased security to prevent this type of automatic data-collecting, the company said.
