• Menu
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

The Cyber Security News

Latest Cyber Security News

Header Right

  • Latest News
  • Vulnerabilities
  • Cloud Services
Cyber Security News

Researchers Block Two Million Extortion Emails Daily

You are here: Home / General Cyber Security News / Researchers Block Two Million Extortion Emails Daily
June 10, 2022

Security researchers are warning users to be on the lookout for extortion scams after revealing they block millions of such emails each day.

Proofpoint claimed in a new blog post that it blocks on average a million extortion emails every 24 hours, rising to two million on high volume days.

These usually come in the form of some kind of sextortion theme – the attacker claims to have a webcam video of the victim watching porn and threatens to distribute it to all of their email contacts unless a ransom is paid in cryptocurrency.

✔ Approved From Our Partners
AOMEI Backupper Lifetime

Protect and backup your data using AOMEI Backupper. AOMEI Backupper takes secure and encrypted backups from your Windows, hard drives or partitions. With AOMEI Backupper you will never be worried about loosing your data anymore.

Get AOMEI Backupper with 72% discount from an authorized distrinutor of AOMEI: SerialCart® (Limited Offer).

➤ Activate Your Coupon Code


Such threats are not new, but the data from Proofpoint shows how widespread they have become. Often, victim information such as passwords is included in the email to add legitimacy to the threat actor’s claim that they have hijacked the machine. In reality, they are usually obtained from data breaches.

As far back as 2016, the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) warned that thousands of victims were falling to sextortion scams in the country each year.

Cryptocurrency payments are a key part of these threats, enabling the attacker to remain anonymous.

“Proofpoint researchers assess with high confidence the extortion branch of the BEC taxonomy would not be as successful or as profound as it is today without cryptocurrency,” the vendor claimed.

However, crypto is also being used and abused in a range of other scams, including more traditional invoice-themed business email compromise (BEC), said Proofpoint.

In some cases, cryptocurrency wallets themselves are targeted in credential phishing attacks. Threat actors typically spoof big names in the industry, such as cryptocurrency exchanges Celo and Binance and wallet vendor Trusted Wallet. Phishing for NFT credentials uses similar techniques, Proofpoint explained.

Easy-to-use phishing kits readily available on the dark web make the job even easier for would-be cyber-criminals.


Some parts of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com

Previous Post: «Cyber Security News Russia: Cyber-Attacks Could Escalate Military Conflict
Next Post: Potent Emotet Variant Spreads Via Stolen Email Credentials potent emotet variant spreads via stolen email credentials»

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Report This Article

Recent Posts

  • Cybercriminals Using New ASMCrypt Malware Loader Flying Under the Radar
  • Lazarus Group Impersonates Recruiter from Meta to Target Spanish Aerospace Firm
  • Post-Quantum Cryptography: Finally Real in Consumer Apps?
  • Microsoft’s AI-Powered Bing Chat Ads May Lead Users to Malware-Distributing Sites
  • Progress Software Releases Urgent Hotfixes for Multiple Security Flaws in WS_FTP Server
  • Cisco Warns of Vulnerability in IOS and IOS XE Software After Exploitation Attempts
  • GitHub Repositories Hit by Password-Stealing Commits Disguised as Dependabot Contributions
  • China’s BlackTech Hacking Group Exploited Routers to Target U.S. and Japanese Companies
  • The Dark Side of Browser Isolation – and the Next Generation Browser Security Technologies
  • China-Linked Budworm Targeting Middle Eastern Telco and Asian Government Agencies

Copyright © TheCyberSecurity.News, All Rights Reserved.