A group of Cybercriminals are using a botnet for a sextortion scheme. As per cybersecurity experts of Cofense Security Solution, the group has a database of 330 million victims email address.
The botnet had a database of 200 million potential victims in 2019
The experts discovered the sextortion botnet in June 2019. At that time, the botnet was having a database of 200 million potential victims email ID, which increased up to 330 million in a mere five-month.
"We have also identified an increase in the number of unique web domains being targeted by the botnet. When we released our original findings, the database had close to 6 million unique domains. That total has grown to 7.4 million unique domains," they added.
How do the Cybercriminals attack the potential victims?
In such attacks, Cybercriminals usually sends thousands of email every day, asking between $800-$1000 from the victims. The email demands the money in term of some not-so-popular cryptocurrency and comes with the deadline also. They threaten the users' that if their demand is not met in the given period, they will release a nude video. Often, the email comes with compromised personal credentials, also including passwords retrieved from some data breach.
A bunch of cybersecurity experts claimed earlier that most of such email recipients don't meet the demand, but a few scared people do pay. Those ways they make millions every month. In June 2019 a group called Phorpiex was assumed to be connected to this incident.
Criminal reaches to mostly young people over social media
Sextortion cases have grown manifold in the last few years. FBI alone gets a deluge of such complains every month through its internet crime complaint centre. These cases usually seeds when a criminal reaches to mostly young people over social media, games or apps through smartphones, computers, and game consoles.
They allure as a friend to convince the victim about their authenticity and later convinces to get sexually-explicit content by deceiving, manipulating or threatening them. The FBI is trying to create awareness for controlling the growing number of cases around the US.
