Business owners have fallen for online scam

IT expert offers advice on avoiding issues

A number of local business owners and managers in Hinckley have fallen for a new scam which sees them paying thousands of pounds in Bitcoin - to prevent potentially embarrassing videos from being released.

The so-called ‘sextortion’ scam has been seen dozens of times over the last few weeks by local data security expert Andy Viner at Intalect.

Yet the scam has now been revealed as nothing more than a clever bluff and can be prevented with a webcam cover costing just £3.

“The scam is clever because it targets the deep emotional fears of intelligent people with lots to lose,” Andy said.

“They can get an unsolicited email from a scammer claiming to have a webcam video recording of them browsing the web during their personal time.

“It’s not specific about what has been recorded, which means the reader jumps to their own conclusion.

“Critically, the scam email also contains their password, which makes them believe they have indeed been hacked and secretly videoed. Some people submit to the spammer’s requests in desperation. They send off £1,000 or more of Bitcoin, to prevent the video being released.”

Andy added: “What most people don’t realise is that this hasn’t been targeted specifically at them and there is no video recording at all.

“It’s a generic email sent to millions of people whose security has been breached in the past.

“Every laptop and phone released these days have built in webcams, it is possible for the cameras to be operated without people realising it - although this is rare.”

Andy has advised that should business owners or managers receive the email, they carry out three steps.

The first, to fit sliding webcam covers to all of their devic- es, secondly to reset all passwords and use a password manager - which fills in passwords automatically, so they can use a set of unintelligible characters rather than a word they’ll have to remember and lastly, not to panic or be embarrassed if they do get a scammy looking email and to talk to a data security expert as soon as you can.

Andy has also offered a free webcam cover to any local business owner or manager who is worried about this scam.

To book a 15 minute data security review with Andy, send an email to andy@intalect.co.uk.