Tag Archives: sextortion

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter Target Resellers of Hacked Accounts

February 4, 2021

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter this week all took steps to crack down on users involved in trafficking hijacked user accounts across their platforms. The coordinated action seized hundreds of accounts the companies say have played a major role in facilitating the trade and often lucrative resale of compromised, highly sought-after usernames.

Nuclear Bot Author Arrested in Sextortion Case

December 17, 2019

Last summer, a wave of sextortion emails began flooding inboxes around the world. The spammers behind this scheme claimed they’d hacked your computer and recorded videos of you watching porn, and promised to release the embarrassing footage to all your contacts unless a bitcoin demand was paid. Now, French authorities say they’ve charged two men they believe are responsible for masterminding this scam. One of them is a 21-year-old hacker interviewed by KrebsOnSecurity in 2017 who openly admitted to authoring a banking trojan called “Nuclear Bot.”

Crooks Continue to Exploit GoDaddy Hole

February 4, 2019

Godaddy.com, the world’s largest domain name registrar, recently addressed an authentication weakness that cybercriminals were using to blast out spam through legitimate, dormant domains. But several more recent malware spam campaigns suggest GoDaddy’s fix hasn’t gone far enough, and that scammers likely still have a sizable arsenal of hijacked GoDaddy domains at their disposal.

Bomb Threat, Sextortion Spammers Abused Weakness at GoDaddy.com

January 22, 2019

Two of the most disruptive and widely-received spam email campaigns over the past few months — including an ongoing sextortion email scamĀ and a bomb threat hoax that shut down dozens of schools, businesses and government buildings late last year — were made possible thanks to an authentication weakness at GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest domain name registrar, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Perhaps more worryingly, experts warn this same weakness that let spammers hijack domains tied to GoDaddy also affects a great many other major Internet service providers, and is actively being abused to launch phishing and malware attacks which leverage dormant Web site names currently owned and controlled by some of the world’s most trusted corporate names and brands.

Who’s Behind the Screencam Extortion Scam?

August 25, 2018

The sextortion email scam last month that invoked a real password used by each recipient and threatened to release embarrassing Webcam videos almost certainly was not the work of one criminal or even one group of criminals. Rather, it’s likely that additional spammers and scammers piled on with their own versions of the phishing email after noticing that some recipients were actually paying up. The truth is we may never find out who’s responsible, but it’s still fun to follow some promising early leads and see where they take us.

The Year Targeted Phishing Went Mainstream

August 2, 2018

A story published here on July 12 about a new sextortion-based phishing scheme that invokes a real password used by each recipient has become the most-read piece on KrebsOnSecurity since this site launched in 2009. And with good reason — sex sells (the second most-read piece here was my 2015 scoop about the Ashley Madison hack).

But beneath the lurid allure of both stories lies a more unsettling reality: It has never been easier for scam artists to launch convincing, targeted phishing and extortion scams that are automated on a global scale. And given the sheer volume of hacked and stolen personal data now available online, it seems almost certain we will soon witness many variations on these phishing campaigns that leverage customized data elements to enhance their effectiveness.

Sextortion Scam Uses Recipient’s Hacked Passwords

July 12, 2018

Here’s a clever new twist on an old email scam that could serve to make the con far more believable. The message purports to have been sent from a hacker who’s compromised your computer and used your webcam to record a video of you while you were watching porn. The missive threatens to release the video to all your contacts unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom. The new twist? The email now references a real password previously tied to the recipient’s email address.