Cybersecurity firm Cofense has released a database containing over 200 million email addresses that are currently “being targeted by a large sextortion scam.” As part of these scams, criminals demand that victims pay them so that they will not release embarrassing information about the recipient, such as a video recorded by the victim’s webcam while they were browsing adult websites. The threat actors don’t actually have such recordings, but some victims fall for the scam and carry out the payment.
In the first half of this year, sextortion scams targeted over 7 million email addresses and lead to $1.5 million in bitcoin payments to scammers. Cofense has released the database in hopes that “victims receiving a sextortion email will find our resource center so they can avoid the anxiety and stress of trying to figure out whether to pay a bitcoin ransom.”
Read more: Warning As Sextortion Attack Targets 200M Email Accounts: Are You On The List?
