UK police are warning of a surge in social media hacking incidents in which victims’ accounts are flooded with indecent photos of small children.
Motion Fraud stated it experienced received scores of studies given that the start out of the year, with incidents expanding thirty day period by thirty day period.
“Based on the overview of these Motion Fraud studies, there appears to be no economic motivation behind this hacking, with no report gained mentioning a ransom need,” it stated.
Protect your privacy by Mullvad VPN. Mullvad VPN is one of the famous brands in the security and privacy world. With Mullvad VPN you will not even be asked for your email address. No log policy, no data from you will be saved. Get your license key now from the official distributor of Mullvad with discount: SerialCart® (Limited Offer).
➤ Get Mullvad VPN with 12% Discount
“Offenders have not been constrained to just indecent photographs, but have reportedly uploaded movies of the very same character. The the vast majority of victims were not conscious of the hacking right until they gained an email from the social media platform informing them that their account experienced been suspended.”
Action Fraud explained any indecent photos of young children ought to be documented to the law enforcement by calling 101 or browsing a local police station. It extra that these kinds of photos need to by no means be screenshotted, saved or shared.
It urged social media consumers to secure their accounts with two-factor authentication, which will aid to mitigate the risk of passwords getting phished, guessed or brute forced by attackers.
Password security can also be improved by deciding upon potent, exclusive credentials this kind of as 3 random words and phrases, it explained.
Social media account takeovers are nothing new, but the posting of indecent photos to deface people accounts is scarce.
A lot more frequent is putting up of cryptocurrency scams and other fraud strategies, as took place to the formal accounts of the British Army previously this thirty day period.
Some account takeover attacks like this are authentic attempts to make dollars by hijacking the have faith in relationship among account holders and their usually big group of followers.
Even so, other folks are tries to obtain notoriety, as was the situation with the hijacking of quite a few NFL teams’ Twitter accounts back again in 2020. In a equivalent stunt earlier this yr, the account of the Washington Metropolitan Location Transit Authority (WMATA) was hacked to post distasteful messages.
Some sections of this write-up are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com