In a potential victim’s view, this kind of attack is a sudden threat to his or her reputation. Sextortion relies on people’s willingness to pay money in order to keep damaging secrets quiet. In reality, the attacker doesn’t actually own any recordings and just uses social engineering techniques to try to scare and shame the potential victim into paying. The attacker threatens to send the recording to the victim’s contacts, friends, and family if they don’t comply. The attackers use this claim of a recording to blackmail the victim into paying the attacker.
Sextortion emails mislead victims into thinking the attacker owns a recording of their screen and camera and that recording contains images or videos of the potential victim in sexually explicit situations. The image below shows the prevalence of sextortion attacks worldwide: Most of these attacks targeted English-speaking users in the United Kingdom and the United States, though we detected campaigns in other languages as well. In January, Avast protected users from various sextortion campaigns which could have resulted in more than 500,000 incidents worldwide. These are just a few of these types of cases. Tragically, sextortion email scams have even led victims to suicide, including a case involving five separate men in the UK and one in the United States.
0 kommentar(er)
