Four years in jail for Webcam peeping tom

by Steve Ragan - Aug 6 2008, 17:49

Sophos reports that a 47-year-old earned four years in jail for peeping on teen. (IMG:J.Anderson)

Sophos reported yesterday that a 47-year-old Cyprus man, who remains unnamed, was sentenced to four years in jail for hacking a teenage girl's Webcam in order to take pictures of her in her bedroom. In 2005, the Cyprus man is said to have taken images of the teenage girl without her knowledge for an unknown length of time. Later, he confronted her with the images and threatened to pass them to everyone in her e-mail address book unless she posed naked for him. The girl refused and told her parents, who then alerted the police.The man, a computer technician in Nicosia, spied on the then 17-year-old girl through her Webcam after infecting her PC with a spyware Trojan horse that he sent her as an e-mail attachment. While an important lesson in the use of Malware, this is not the first case of someone using Malware to activate Webcams to spy on people. In early 2005, a Spanish computer science student was fined by a Spanish court for spying on a young woman via her Webcam. The student used, the now antique, Sub7 Trojan, a classic among older hacker community members, to activate the girl’s camera to take pictures of her, and remotely monitor her conversations online.Similarly, in 2006, Adrian Ringland from Ilkeston in Derbyshire, was sentenced to ten years in jail after admitting to posing as a minor on Internet chatrooms and using spyware to take explicit photographs via children's Webcams. And, earlier this year, a 27-year-old Canadian man was charged with using spyware to take over the Webcams of girls as young as 14, before then coercing them into posing naked for him."Most spyware is designed to steal your identity, your passwords, your banking information - but it is just as easy to program a Trojan horse to take over your webcam," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "This case highlights that as well as malware being used for financial gain, it can also be used by voyeurs," he added. "Everyone needs to treat computer security as paramount importance to ensure they do not fall victim to an internet blackmailer or peeping tom."

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Tom Z.Aug 7th, 2008 - 00:42:12

So this guy deserves jail time, this is true, but lesson learned: don't have your web cam on all the time, and who opens e-mail attachments from someone you don't know, I don't even download attachments from people I do know.

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Pervert Hackers Take Note!Aug 8th, 2008 - 18:17:49

You dont have to have your webcam on for people to be able to watch you through spyware and trojans. As long as it is plugged in, someone can view whatever is going on. Parents dont let your kids have webcams! Who would let a little girl have a webcam in her room unsupervised with a computer? That's just bad parenting! Keep all computers in shared rooms like the living room.

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Four years in jail for Webcam peeping tom

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