In four days more than a thousand citizens have received in their inboxes e-mail a threat: or pay between 1,300 and 1,700 euros in criptomonedas or your contacts will know that you have visited websites porn.
This massive campaign of ciberestafa using sextortion has been released this Tuesday by the deputy director general of Human Resources and Training of the National Police, Pilar Allué, at the press conference in which the Forces and Bodies of Security of the State report on the latest developments of their performance in relation to the health crisis of the COVID-19.
The police believes that this “surge” of emails from this kind of blackmail received by the citizenship during the last few days it has to do with the confinement derived from the state of alarm.
Higher consumption of porn and greater intensity of the scams sextortion
Confinement has caused in countries such as Spain, higher consumption of television and the internet. A trend that is no stranger to the porn on the basis of the data handled by a reference in the sector. In Spain, since the early days of quarantine, Pornhub has been posting traffic increases sustained. And tonic it seems to be exactly the same in the rest of the world.
The increase in “significant” cases of this type of scam, the Police National figure in at least a thousand, has been quantified only through the emails, notifications and complaints from citizens who have received the cybercrime unit of the body. That is to say, are only reported caseswhich makes me suspect that there have been many more registrants in the past few weeks.
The sextortion, as he recalled the commissioner Allué at the press conference, it is a blackmail which consists in threatening a potential victim with the shipment to their contacts ‘ pictures, videos or intimate information that [los atacantes] would have been obtained after hacking his terminal”. Something that usually is not true. In the massive current that has been detected, threatening to inform on the visited web pages of pornographic content.
The recommendation of police to citizens is do not get alarmed or consider the threat as realnot to make any payment requested, do not reply to the mail or received mail, or engage in any kind of conversation with the extortionistsblock and mark as junk mail to the sender of the e-mails, be wary of any mail that may seem strange and of unknown origin, do not click on links in the body of the e-mail received, do not open attachments sent from e-mail received, renew your email password, computer and software applications regularly and establish secure passwords, as well as keep up-to-date computer equipment.
it was originally published in
Engadget
by
Toni Castillo
.
