The global leader of the intelligent phishing defense solutions has released a database where they have mentioned about over 200 million compromised accounts. A massive sextortion scam has targeted those accounts, and the defense solutions wanted to ensure to the potential victims and the employers so that they can address the issue beforehand. By addressing the issue from earlier, they can prevent any possible loss of wages and their productivity.
In June 2019, the Cofense Labs has researched things about these possible sextortion attacks, and they discovered that some primary emails about sextortion were ruling some people’s inbox. The research team also in the work to monitor the botnet’s activity regularly so that they can notice any potential changes about malicious malware and cybercrimes as well. They wanted to ensure that they can track malware and the email addresses that are the victims of the sextortion phishing emails.
Well, this sextortion is an email-based scam. They depend on the emotion-driven motivators like fear and emergency to wrench random payment. This is to ensure that the attackers do not spread our sensitive information. Over or around 7 million email addresses have been targeted by this increasingly pervasive threat in the half of 2019.
Moreover, the Cofense also observed that digital wallets had made more than $1.5M payments with that increasing sextortion campaign. In also contained poor password issues, infrequent changes of passwords, reusing your email across various sites, and similar things help the further risk of sextortion threats.
However, this botnet won’t attack your computer to steal your new data, which is true, but the attackers are reusing the credentials from past data breaches to give people some panic through their sextortion scams. And if your email message is also being targeted, get ready to receive some sextortion emails.
References:
https://cofense.com/sextortion
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