Cybercriminals appear to have an infinite repertoire of strategies at their disposal when it comes to forcefully extracting financial information from victims. They prefer specific methods over others, and extortion is one of them.
Keep in mind that blackmailers will not just use one trick, but will use various types of extortion to force their victims to do their bidding, whether it is paying them a significant sum of money or performing tasks on their behalf.
Hack and extort
The term is rather self-explanatory, but to be sure, the extortionist will access your device or online accounts, search your files for any sensitive or valuable data, and steal it. Although it may resemble ransomware in some ways, the breaking and entering of your system is done manually, and the cybercriminal has to dedicate time and resources in doing so.
Unless your password was compromised in a large-scale data breach, in which case the job required is negligible. The successfully targeted individual is then sent an email in which the criminal attempts to force the intended victim into paying by threatening to expose this data and listing examples for added effect.
To safeguard yourself, try encrypting your data and adequately protecting all of your accounts with a strong passphrase, as well as enabling two-factor authentication whenever possible.
Sextortion
Sextortion is precisely what it sounds like: extortion carried out with the threat of exposing sexual material about the target. Sextortionists might approach the practice in a variety of ways. Until the criminal gains the victim's trust and persuades them to switch from the dating platform to a regular messaging service, it may begin as an apparent romantic dalliance through a dating platform.
This is done in order to prevent setting off the security measures that dating apps employ to identify possible con artists. After the victim leaves the dating site, they will attempt to persuade them to share some explicit or risqué images or videos, which they will then use as leverage in a blackmail campaign. As an alternative, hackers can opt to break into a victim's computer and take control of their webcam in order to secretly monitor and even record explicit images or videos of them; American model and previous Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf was a victim of such sextortion.
Sending risqué images to anyone is not advisable. Even if you trust someone, you can't rule out the possibility that their devices or accounts have been compromised, sensitive images have been exposed, or that your current level of trust in them has changed or is otherwise wrong. To mitigate your risks of getting hacked, keep your gadgets patched and updated, and utilise a respected security solution.
DDoS extortion
Cybercriminals frequently use distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on enterprises in an attempt to completely disable their target's capacity to offer services. They frequently post their services on DDoS-for-hire marketplaces in an effort to increase their illicit revenue. Threat actors use a large number of machines arranged into a botnet to bombard a target with requests during these attacks.
The goal is to overwhelm the target's systems to the point where they fail, so taking them offline. Attacker scans can cause this to continue for days at a time, costing some businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales. For instance, a cybercrime collective recently threatened to use DDoS assaults against multiple organisations unless they paid ransoms ranging from US$57,000 to US$227,000 by adopting the garb of well-known shacking groups.
Setting up a firewall to deny access to all unauthorised IP addresses and enrolling with a DDoS mitigation provider are just a few steps you can take to defend yourself from DDoS extortion attempts.
