Google sues Chinese group selling software behind text message scams, FT reports

Google has filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against China-based hackers who it says run the Lighthouse platform for “phishing services,” ensnaring 1M people in 121 countries and stealing more than $1B, The Financial Times’ Stephen Morris, Eleanor Olcott, and Mehul Srivastava report. Google is seeking to win a judgment under the U.S. racketeering and computer fraud laws that would allow it to work with cellular networks and companies that host websites to take down the domains and servers underpinning the operation. “Criminals are leveraging the trust and reputation of our brand to lure users into unsafe phishing attacks,” Google’s general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said in an interview. “The ability to put our engineers and lawyers to work to actually fight on behalf of those users is a necessary thing to do.”