The United States has an ongoing campaign of ‘sextortion’, where thousands are being targeted with a GandCrab ransomware and removal which costs the victims $500.
These sextortion emails usually ask victims for this amount by blackmailing them about compromising information related to adult website visits. This particular campaign although took it one step further. When someone clicks on such a link, the GandCrab ransomware software is installed on their computers.
Victims that are on a lookout for ransomware removal have informed others about how they were affected and what extortion strategies are being used by the perpetrators. These victims claimed that they received emails quite randomly and it seemed as if a bad actor claimed to have some information about their activities on some adult websites.
What scared these individuals was the fact that these perpetrators offered the victims links to video presentations which had screenshots of their activities on such websites. After this, they go on to blackmail the victims to send the screenshots to colleagues, friends and members of their family before adding that $500 is a very small amount to ask for their silence.
For the perpetrator’s authorization of ransomware removal $500 then needs to be paid via open-source cryptocurrency like DASH or Bitcoin.
This isn’t the first time GandCrab has made its way to the headlines in the past year. Their earlier aim was in South Korea where their egg attachments were found in the payload of pop-ups of these compromised websites. Check Point, found in their research that till date, GandCrab has affected more than 50,000 victims and in just their first 2 months, they managed to make $600,000.
Even though the research shows immense amounts of extortions, they are claiming that such sextortion scams may not even have said screenshots of the activity or may be fake. The question here is, would victims take the risk to find out?
