By Cofense Contributor
Are you one in two hundred (or so) million?
Cofense this month announced the launch of Cofense Labs. Our experts are sharing the details of some deep research into the inner workings of a large-scale sextortion campaign that to date has over 200 million recipients in its sights – and you might be one of them.
What’s Sextortion?
You may be lucky enough to have not encountered the threatening narrative of a sextortion email. If so, the threat actor’s method of operation is typically this:
Send an email in which they claim to have installed malware on your system and have a record of your browsing history to some websites of an adult nature, and also footage from your webcam. If you don’t pay the stated ransom in bitcoin, they will release the footage to your family, friends, and co-workers. To add credibility to their threats, they include passwords collected from data breaches of old that they found littering the web.
Their slogan is: Show me the money!
Find Out If Your Business Is at Risk.
During the research into this campaign, Cofense Labs identified more than 200 million recipients on the target list. More than 7.8 million sextortion emails have been analysed and bitcoin payments have been tracked. In this single campaign, over 17,000 bitcoin wallets were identified, with 1,265 payments being made across 321 of them, with one payment equals one victim. At the time of analysis, these payments were worth in excess of $1.8 million.
We made it possible for you to check whether your email address, or email domain, is on the list. Just visit https://cofense.com/sextortion to perform the lookup and download an infographic and educational guide regarding sextortion campaigns and how to defend against them.
Knowing is everything, and to be able to effectively defend against the fast-evolving phishing threat landscape, you’ve got to have a deep understanding of it. Cofense Labs allows us to share the results and the output of the pioneering research that our R&D team undertakes to provide this knowledge. By sharing what we know, we can hopefully enable organizations of all sizes to collaborate and protect their most precious assets against the latest phishing threats.
To learn more about phishing and malware threats, read Cofense’s 2019 Phishing Threat & Malware Review.