London's prestigious plastic surgery clinic, London Bridge Plastic Surgery (LBPS), has decided to take revenge on hackers who have stolen confidential data from its patients and disclose their identity.

"We found a few small, but insolent attempts to collect information about us," one of the participants of Dark Overlord, the group that attacked LBPS last month, told The Daily Beast.. It seems that the doctors decided not to remain in debt and themselves to crack hackers.

Dark Overlord provided The Daily Beast with a Word document received from the chief surgeon of the Christopher Inglefield clinic,. As the metadata shows, the document was created on October 19 - before LBPS was known to the general public. The file contained excerpts from two articles about Dark Overlord.

At first glance the harmless file was not so harmless. In fact, he did not contain any text at all. Two articles were part of the image stored on the LBPS server. After opening the document, a connection was established with the server, from which the image was extracted. Thus, the clinic could obtain the IP address of hackers, and with its help, law enforcement agencies could request from the Internet provider their physical address (of course, only if hackers did not use Tor or other means to disguise the real IP address).

Law enforcement agencies often use the above described method, but for this they need to obtain a corresponding warrant. Private companies and individuals can also use it, but in this case the legality of their actions will be in doubt.

"We contacted Christopher about his attempt to deanomize us, but he vehemently denied everything.. However, we noted that this attempt was made from its shared folder on the server of its own company. We punished Christopher accordingly, "- reported Dark Overlord.

According to hackers, the LBPS attempt was unsuccessful. The clinic refused to comment on the situation.