Online Scam Exposes 27 Mln To Sexual Blackmail Attempt

Israeli research found that over 27 million users were exposed to online sexual blackmail attempt over a five-month period, the Israeli software technologies giant company Check Point reported Wednesday

JARUSALEM, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 17th Oct, 2019 ) :Israeli research found that over 27 million users were exposed to online sexual blackmail attempt over a five-month period, the Israeli software technologies giant company Check Point reported Wednesday.

In a comprehensive research, the company revealed a bot net that uses many thousands of infected computers to deliver millions of such threats to innocent recipients.

The botnet investigated, called "Phorpiex", currently operates more than 500,000 infected hosts. Recently, Phorpiex started a new form of revenue generation, running large-scale "sextortion" campaigns.

Sextortion is an email scam of the blackmail variety, as an email is sent to an unsuspecting victim that threatens to expose sexual activity if payment is not made.

Most commonly, such scams will claim to be from someone who has hacked into the victim's web browser using a vulnerability that had not been patched.

Phorpiex uses an automated spam bot program that downloads a database of email addresses. Then, an email address is randomly selected from the database, and a message is composed of several hard-coded strings.

It was found in the research that the spam bot can produce up to 30,000 users per hour.

Furthermore, in the last spam campaigns, the Phorpiex spam bot used databases with leaked passwords in combination with email addresses, which exacerbates the threat by showing that the password is known to the attacker.

For further shock value, the message starts with a string containing the password. Check Point, founded in 1993 and based in Israel's central city of Ramat Gan and in the U.S. city of San Carlos in California, is traded at Nasdaq with a market cap of about 16.74 billion U.S. Dollars.