If you happen to receive an email containing a message in which the anonymous sender claims to have compromising images or videos about you, with the promise not to divulge its contents if you agree to pay a large ransom in bitcoin, you have probably been taken of aims from "Phorpiex", the botnet recently used by cyber criminals to send "sextortion" messages, or sexual blackmail with the aim of scaring or extorting money from victims.
Regarding this phenomenon, which has seen a 500% increase over the past three years, becoming a real business for web criminals, researchers at Check Point, an Israeli company with computer security experts, have found that in recent months there has been a noticeable increase in reports of online fraud attempts in which hackers attempt to extort money from their victims through sexual blackmail propagated through fake threatening emails or on social networks, claiming to have filmed unfortunates while visiting pornographic sites or were busy in other sexual activities in front of the PC screen.
It is interesting that, according to Check Point, through Phorpiex (also known as Trik) criminals would control around 450,000 computers around the world without their owners' knowledge, and by using these same "zombie" devices they can spread ransomware and cryptominer by sending over 30,000 email per hour. Furthermore, in some of the recent sextortion spam campaigns through Phorpiex, the sender of the e-mail no longer simply declares that it has sexual videos on the victim, but also claims to know the password to access the victim's account.
According to experts, these statements are only half true, as all the email addresses used in these campaigns are also present in the "Have I Been Pwned" site database, and passwords probably come from past data breaches, so in the meanwhile they could (and good practice should) have been changed, even if users who have not changed their keyword for a long time can actually be terrified to see that the one indicated by the blackmailer is really his current password.
By monitoring the sextortion emails distributed via the Phorpiex botnet and 74 bitcoin addresses on which payments are being requested, the researchers were able to estimate the gain made by the criminal hackers, and in the last six months they recorded a total of 157 payments for a total amount of about 96 thousand dollars, or an amount of almost 15 thousand euros a month, a decent nest egg for an activity that ultimately costs virtually nothing to the cyber criminal, apart from the "effort" of throwing the hook and waiting for the next victim who will take the blackmail.
[ Translation of the original article by Nicola Bernardi, president of Federprivacy - Italy: