International email-based extortion scams are the work of only a small group of fraudsters, new analysis from Barracuda Networks has revealed.
The safety vendor teamed up with Columbia College to research over 300,000 extortion emails tracked by the agency over a one-year interval. They appeared particularly on the Bitcoin addresses utilized by the scammers to be able to discern particular tendencies.
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“We discovered that certainly the assaults are concentrated inside a small variety of bitcoin addresses. There are in whole round 3000 distinctive bitcoin addresses in our dataset, of which the highest 10 addresses seem in about 30% of emails, and the highest 100 addresses seem in about 80% of emails,” defined Columbia grasp’s scholar Zixi Wang.
“We conclude that although extortion is a big e mail risk with hundreds of thousands of malicious emails despatched to victims yearly, it’s attributable to a comparatively small group of perpetrators (fewer than 100 attackers, and doubtless an excellent smaller quantity than that, assuming attackers use a number of bitcoin addresses). We suspect this small teams of attackers use comparable greatest practices and templates.”
To remain beneath the radar, the fraudsters sometimes demand an quantity between $400 and $5000, with 90% asking for lower than $2000.
This “candy spot” is regarded as chosen as a result of it’s extra possible victims can pay with out investigating whether or not the scammer really has compromising data on them. It’s additionally a sufficiently small determine to not elevate any crimson flags with the sufferer’s financial institution or tax authorities, Wang argued.
Scammers sometimes declare to have embarrassing pictures or video photographs of the sufferer, typically taken through their PC webcam with non-existent ‘spyware and adware,’ which they threaten to share publicly. They could additionally threaten to share the sufferer’s e mail and chat historical past.
Wang argued that the very fact such a small group of fraudsters seems to be chargeable for such a prolific risk is trigger for optimism.
“First, we suspect that if regulation enforcement is ready to monitor down even a small variety of these attackers, they’ll considerably disrupt this risk,” she concluded.
“Second, since extortion attackers appear to be copying one another and following very comparable templates, e mail safety distributors ought to have the ability to block a big proportion of those assaults with comparatively easy detectors.”
