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The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Note that even were the email believable (which it isn’t), our staff member assures us that she was not ‘playing with her stuff’ in front of her laptop, and even if she were, her laptop camera is always covered by one of these: In any event, the success, for the blackmailer, of things like the Hollywood hospital ransomware attack no doubt emboldened lots of other criminals and would be criminals, which leads us to the below extortion attempt, which was received by a staff member over the weekend. One of the first known ransomware Trojans happened back in 2005, when authorities warned of a new virus that held your files for ransom until you paid up. Other examples are the Archiveus ransomware trojan, and Ransom-A. You may recall that a couple of years ago Hollywood Presbyterian hospital paid $17,000 to have their file system unlocked. We’ve been writing about it for well over a decade, and it’s even older than that. Online blackmail and extortion is nothing new.
Some such activity comes in the form of ransomware (where your files get locked or wiped and then you have to pay to be able to access them and get them back), and some comes in the form of plain old blackmail, such as the example below. You may have heard about big companies being extorted for hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even more, in order to keep their companies from being blackmailed over something, and being brought down by a DDOS, or having some scandal (either real or fabricated) made public.
Online computer extortion and blackmail is nothing new.
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