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‘I Know What You Did on the Net’
상태바
‘I Know What You Did on the Net’
Spammers feed on fear of porn viewers and downloaders
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By Park Jun-young WIRED Korea
 
As Korean law enforcement agencies are investigating the sexual exploitation of women and young girls by the operators of porn chatrooms on the Telegram messenger, scammers are sending spams threatening to expose email account owners as viewers of pornographic materials in the chatrooms unless they send money to them.
 
AhnLab, a Korean security software provider, warns against such spams. It says they have increased in number as prosecutors and police are conducting extensive investigations into the chatroom case, promising to take action against those who paid for access to the chatrooms as well as their operators.
 
The police suspect that up to 60,000 people paid for access to what is called “nth rooms,” or the serialized chatrooms on Telegram, whose operators allegedly had pornographic materials made of women, young girls and even minors and posted them in membership-only and end-to-end encryption chatrooms.
 
One fraudster says in his spam that he recorded the email account owner’s cam showing him watching porn on such and such sites and that he would send his recordings to the email account owner’s contacts unless he was paid a little more than $1,000 in cryptocurrency. The perpetrator claims that he has access to all of the account owner’s contacts on social network, messenger and email services.
 
“If I don’t get the bitcoins (that he demanded in the amount equivalent to $1,164), I will deliberately send your video to all your contacts,” says the spammer, who wrote the email account owner’s ID and password in the body of the spam in what appears to be an additional ploy to agitate the receiver. But the spam contained no video capture, file or malware.
 
Such spammers apparently feed on fear of potential victims, as the law enforcement agencies are cracking down on the operators of the membership-only Telegram chatrooms and those who paid for access to them. Their fear is also fueled by the court’s move to hand down harsher punishment to internet sex crime perpetrators under mounting pressure from the public.
 
“Of late, attackers appear to be exploiting user account information that have already been leaked to fan fear to account owners, who may be easily deceived,” says Park Tae-hwan, who heads the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center. “It is necessary for internet users to avoid accessing illegal websites and take basic security precautions to prevent their information from being stolen.”
 
AhnLab advises email users to remove spams as soon as they receive them and change their passwords. If they use the same passwords for access to other sites, it says, they will also have to change them if they are to forestall any further damage.
 
Also on the rise now is the number of cyberattacks, with many corporations turning to remote work as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus. The Secudium Center of SK Infosec, a Korean information security company, reports that it detected 1.7 million cyberattacks against internet users in the first quarter of this year, up 21 percent from the same quarter of 2019.
 
Among the cyberattacks were very serious cases, says Secudium Center, which is withholding information regarding the victims. In March, an attacker stole the ID and password of a corporate employee working from home and used them in hacking the server of his company, it says. Other cases involved hackers who accessed a corporate server and used it to mail spams or who used corporate servers in mining cryptocurrencies.
 
“When there are social crises, such as the spread of the coronavirus, hackers have always attempted to exploit them in their cyberattacks,” says Lee Jae-woo, who heads the platform business group at SK Infosec. “You have to keep your guard up under whatever demanding conditions you may find yourself in.”
 
Park Jun-young’s Korean-language article is found at <스팸 사이버 공격, 이번 타겟은 '음란물 이용 내역'>.
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