Along with the technological revolution and development, the criminals who are hiding behind the computer screens have found a way to bypass the strict filters and spam prevention on email accounts while claiming that through this they will publish a video of the user watching porn.
Sextortion is a kind of blackmail in which scammers send an email trying to convince that they have hacked into a user's account and then install malware which will be capable of monitoring which site the user has visited and immediately it can record a video via the webcam. After recording the video they send the multimedia files to the contacts the victim has unless the extortion demand is fulfilled.
How hackers are now targeting people?
As stated by the security firm Bleeping Computer, such scams are now being sent in foreign languages. It should be noted that hackers are now playing a smart game as they are splitting bitcoin addresses into two parts to avoid detection from the filters. The only English sentence that appears in such emails is "use Google translator."
There are many users who will delete the email when they will notice that it was not written in English. But there are other people who may face difficulty to combine both parts of the Bitcoin address to work out where they need to send the extortion payment. It should be mentioned that the hacking groups following this new method are clearly betting on it being better in the long term to bypass the spam filters entirely.
New method applied
As per the recent finding, Bleeping Computer has noticed an example which was written in Russia, with instructions to translate into English was written at the top of the email.
The hackers split the address of Bitcoin payment into two sections, which have to be combined to get the result, "3Bv9QgEw15QQo1TEUVW4hbBkkd2fEtFfPP." The experts from the company mentioned that as of now nobody has sent any payments to this address.
The course of action
If anyone can find such suspicious email notification they should mark the correspondence as spam on the respective email provider. This process sends a signal to the service providers such as Apple, Google and Microsoft that the content which a user has marked as spam is unwanted and that will help these companies to update their filters to prevent these emails even dropping into your inbox in future.
To ensure the safety as well as security of the device and to make sure that hackers won't get a chance to make the system vulnerable via the webcam, it's better to use latest operating system and software, including up-to-date protections against dangerous computer viruses and malware.
