Phishing, a very basic yet very widely successful method of doing online frauds in India, it’s a clever attack where an attacker takes away critical information using fake website or app and then use that information to exploit innocent people. With time cyber criminals develop new methods to do this attack and here I am narrating one such Incident.
Incident:
So, one fine afternoon a gentleman came to my house. He was in a very uncomfortable state of mind struggling to find the words to define his problem. Upon as politely he said that he is facing threat online.
He came into contact of a girl via messenger, she asked him to do a video call and there she recorded his nude video and started threatening him that if he will not give money, she will viral the recording. She even hacked into his social media accounts and started threatening him that if he will not pay, she will post all of that video on stories.
Let’s Understand what happened here:
Social media has been a blessing to mankind and it has helped us to stay connected with our loved once and even sometimes bless us with some unexpected friendship. But as every coin has two sides there is also some things going on which is very bad.
This kind of things is being exploited in a wild way these days. What generally happens a person posing as a beautiful girl will talk to you nicely for few minutes and then will send you a link and will ask you to open it saying it’s a surprise for you and in excitement you open that link and you end up compromising your social media account.
Now here, the gender of a person is also questionable because there are many applications which can change the gender of your voice in real time.
The link which people send you is called phishing link and it’s not new but now many people have started something called phishing as a service where they sell phishing kits to people which is ready to use and this make this attack a very easy thing to do.
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After this the person will lure you to come over video chat and will somehow pursuit you to go nude and that’s where you are in trouble and the game of extortion starts.
How to stay safe?
Technical aspect:
· Activate two factor authentication in your social media accounts there are many tutorials available on internet how to do so.
· Never share any otp associated to your social media account with anyone.
· Keep your profile lock to avoid misuse of the information present on your social media.
Psychological aspect:
· Don’t lose your common sense and don’t do anything stupid which can ruin your reputation in the society.
· Avoid talking to the people whose social media account is not looking natural.
· There is always a reason if someone you don’t know suddenly start talking to you nicely out of nowhere, be aware!
· India being country of youth have very active hormonal energy and this is the reason why many youngsters fall in this trap. Social media is just a digitalization of our society so as you behave in society behave in the same way there too.
Economical aspect:
· Most of the people in India are either from Middle class household or from a very poor household and this is a basis why this type of things is happening. People looking for shortcuts to earn a fortune is doing this type of stuffs and the people who are actually working honestly do have work pressure, tension or frustration and because of all these they fall in this trap and this is how the demand and supply bridge of this system is working
About the author:
Name: Mudit Sinha(Cyber security trainer & Data Analyst)
Trained police It cell Jalandhar and Border Security Forces, Fareedkot on the topic of cyber security awareness.
Computer Science Engineering (LPU,Punjab)
Social Psychology (Wesleyan University, Coursera)
Macroeconomics (University of California, Irvine,Coursera)
