Sophos reports that the 47-year-old man from Cyprus has been given a four year jail sentence after hacking into a teenage girl’s webcam in order to take illicit pictures of the young woman in her bedroom.
According to reports, the man, who has not been named (and I think he should be named) but is a computer technician, spied on the then 17-year-old girl through her webcam after infecting her PC with a Trojan horse spyware that he sent to her as an email attachment. The teenager’s machine became infected after she made the mistake of opening an infected email attachment.
The middle-aged hacker took compromising photos of the teenager while she was alone in her bedroom for an extended period of time without her knowledge, and then threatened to send the pictures to her email contacts unless she posed naked in front of the webcam. The girl refused and the police were contacted, resulting in the man’s arrest in 2005.
The incident is just the latest example of technically minded peeping Toms have hacking into webcams for illicit thrills. In January and February 2005 two unnamed Spanish residents were cuffed for webcam hacking in separate incidents, according to The Register.
Read the whole story at The Register.
This could happen to anybody, anywhere, that has a webcam…what a scary concept. All the more reason we have to know what our children are doing online.
Wow Donna that is creepy. Hacking can do so many evil things its scary. Glad that dude got caught.
Tim, I know, very creepy!