A Byron Close, Nottingham man, identified as Robert Davies, has been sent to jail for two years and two months by a Nottingham Crown Court for spying on children and women using RATs (remote access trojans).
Moreover, he used crypters to disguise the malware from anti-virus tools. In some cases, he used Skype accounts to catfish his targets. He tricked them into performing sexual acts. He even befriended an eleven-year-old girl, and their relationship lasted for two years. He accessed her computer and switched the webcam on without her knowledge.
Webcam Hacker Jailed for 4 Years for Spying on Teenager
In January 2022, a UK man was jailed for over two years after using RATs and other cybercrime tools to spy on women and children. He is said to have used fake profiles on messaging apps to make contact his victims, persuading them to download the RATs via malicious links. This provided access to their machines and devices, where he hijacked webcams and searched for saved photos and videos containing compromising images.
Amongst those arrested was Swedish hacker Alex Yücel, the co-creator of the Blackshades Remote Access Tool (RAT), which provides an easy way for perverts to remotely commandeer the webcams of unsuspecting parties and snoop upon their activities.
Kenny (Alex Lawther) returns home from his restaurant job to find that his sister Lindsey (Maya Gerber) has unintentionally infected his laptop with malware. Kenny downloads an anti-malware trojan, allowing unseen hackers to record him masturbating through his webcam; they email the teenager, threatening to leak the footage if he refuses to comply.
Stuart Joy, writer of the book Through the Black Mirror: Deconstructing the Side Effects of the Digital Age, analysed that the portrayal of Kenny as youthful deceives the viewer and challenges societal perceptions of paedophiles. Lawther said of the script: "How brilliant [it was] that they'd made me sympathize with a paedophile for so long, and the complexity of that, because he's so young". His character is 19 years old, a withdrawn and socially-awkward teenager who is easily intimidated by workplace bullies and infantilised by his mother. Joy noted that Kenny's attitude towards sex is indicative of immaturity. Questioned by the much older Hector about what the hackers had caught him doing, Kenny refuses to say the word "masturbation", instead using the euphemism "doing it". Other moments emphasizing his childlike nature include a series of nervous tics, twitches and stutters exhibited by Kenny, as well as a moment where he urinates himself out of terror when forced to commit a bank robbery.[19]
In one high-profile instance, Miss Teen USA winner Cassidy Wolf was blackmailed after her webcam was accessed by an unauthorised user. The hacker, who was eventually jailed for 18 months, threatened to share naked pictures of her unless she sent him more explicit images.
However, there are others who could be watching through your webcam, and the stories of compromised cameras are genuinely terrifying: hackers taunting people and spying on women at home, blackmailing teens into sharing nude photos, and schools even keeping watch on their students. "This is a pretty invasive, targeted form of malware, but the consequences can be super embarrassing," said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The same cybersecurity vulnerabilities that are making our corporations and government agencies ripe for cyber exploitations from foreign intelligence agencies and hackers are making teenagers and young adults ripe for highly-remote sexual exploitations.
A surprising number of cases cross international borders as well. Sixteen cases (21 percent) involve a perpetrator victimizing at least one person in a country other than that in which he is himself residing.92 This finding seems particularly challenging. It used to be impossible to sexually assault someone in a different country. That is no longer true. The same cybersecurity vulnerabilities that are making our corporations and government agencies ripe for cyber exploitations from foreign intelligence agencies and hackers are making teenagers and young adults ripe for highly-remote sexual exploitations.
Indeed, in a high-profile criminal case back in 2014, US youngster Jared James Abrahams, a college student in California who was studying computer science, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for spying on women via their webcams.
The sextortionist who snapped nude pictures of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf through her laptop's webcam has been found and arrested, the FBI revealed yesterday. 19-year old Jared James Abrahams, a California computer science student who went by the online handle "cutefuzzypuppy," had as many as 150 "slave" computers under his control during the height of his webcam spying in 2012.
If someone told you ten years ago that your teenager was going to take a video camera with them into the bathroom, what would you have said? I know what I would have said, and I can not repeat it here.
The great majority of these criminals target women, but men can also be victims. And while many webcam hackers use images and videos to satisfy voyeuristic needs or humiliate victims, others are just in it for the money. One Australian man literally caught with his pants down was told to pay $10,000 or else he would be exposed online. He refused, but noted that double standards often mean women feel more compelled to comply.
Not only do Mark Zuckerbeg and the FBI recommend covering up that computer camera, so do leading academics. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, says that cyber hacking is more common than we think. He told CBC that hackers will often trade access to hacked computers, saying that the same kind of software is used to hack political dissidents, members of activist groups, and journalists. "These are people that are regularly targeted by different hacking groups because of their work, and in some cases we have evidence that they're spied on through their webcams," he said. Naturally, he covers his camera too. Not surprisingly, the sentiment is echoed by tech experts, who stress the frequency in which hacking occurs. Their view is backed by research: a 2015 report by the Digital Citizens Alliance calls hacking a growing problem for consumers, particularly young women.
April 27, 2011: Campus police arrested a 17-year-old boy suspected of spying on at least two women in showers at UC Berkeley residence halls last week, a police spokesman said. The teenager was arrested after a woman reported the fifth peeping case since February to campus police on April 18, Lt. Alex Yao said. (link) 2ff7e9595c
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