Extortion “for adults”

[Демитрий]

Extortion “for adults”

One fine — well, or not very fine — day you look at the mail and find a letter there that starts something like this:

“********** seems to be your password. You do not know me and you were probably very surprised to receive this letter. The fact is that I hacked the porn site you visited ... ".

Or so:

“I hacked into this mailbox and infected your operating system with a virus ...”

Or:

“I am a member of an international hacker group. As you can guess, your account has been hacked ... ".

There are actually many options. But in the end, it all boils down to the fact that the author of the letter allegedly hacked into one of your accounts or posted a malicious program on a porno and infected your computer. Having gained full access to your device, he allegedly was able to collect all your contacts from an electronic mailbox, social networks, instant messengers and a phone book. I also used your webcam to make a video: on it, one part of the picture is occupied by the video you are watching, and the second is your reaction to it.

Attackers threaten to send the video to all your friends and colleagues. If you do not want this to happen, they require that you transfer a certain amount in cryptocurrency to an anonymous wallet.
Some scammers give you several days to do this, claiming that they know exactly when you read the letter: it supposedly contains a “special pixel” that allows them to track that the letter has been read. Sometimes, to finally convince you in the existence of a compromising video , you are prompted to reply to the message - then the scammers will send the video to several selected friends.

Of course, in the case of payment, they promise you to immediately destroy the video and contact database of your relatives and friends.

Calm down, nobody shot you
In fact, neither the omnipotent "virus" nor the shameful movie exists in nature. How does anyone know your password? And everything is very simple: the ransomware uses one of the many databases sold on the darknet, which contain accounts and passwords leaked from a variety of Internet services. Alas, such leaks are not uncommon - at least 163 million records leaked in the United States over the incomplete last year.

As for information about watching adult videos, the ransomware does not know anything about this. This is a mass mailing - it sends similar letters to thousands or even millions of people, automatically substituting the addressee's password from the database (or some other "personal" details) in the letter. It would be quite enough for a fraudster if at least a couple of dozen of those who received the threatened letter agreed to pay.

The same can be said about the promise to send a video of three to five to your friends. Few people want to verify that compromising material really exists, thus . Most people choose not to risk even the limited disclosure of their secrets.

Extortionist letter - and ransomware trojan as a gift
However, recently scammers have come up with an even more effective way to make you pay: in early December, researchers from Proofpoint discovered a newsletter in which the victim offer to personally verify the existence of the video without attracting friends. To do this, just follow the link in the letter.

Naturally, if you do this, you will not find any video. Instead, you will be prompted to download the ZIP archive - but if you unzip it and run its contents, then you will infect your system for real.

No, the movie about how you watch porn, the attackers will not remove it anyway. They simply encrypt all your files with malware GandCrab . And again they will demand a ransom in cryptocurrency - now for data recovery.

What to do?
To avoid becoming a victim of ransomware scammers, we recommend that you exercise caution and follow a few simple rules. So what not to do:

• First of all - do not panic and in no case pay extortionists!
• We do not recommend answering a soliciting letter - this way you will only show that your address is valid and similar “business offers” will come more often.
• Do not follow the links in such letters: you will not find anything good there. In the best case, you will be overwhelmed with advertising, at worst - download the virus.

But what to do is worth it:

• If you are still using the password sent in the ransomware letter on some resources, be sure to change it. And it’s better to immediately come up with a more reliable password.
• If you are afraid that you will not remember the new password, the password manager will do this for you.
• It also does not hurt to have a reliable antivirus.

Source: kaspersky.ru

 

[Матушкин Андрей Николаевич]