Cryptocurrency Email Extortion Is Currently Increasing, According To Study

According to a recent academic study, there has been an increase in extortion related to cryptocurrencies, which consists of the use of botnets that generate spam to “ransom” compromised information and dirty images in exchange for bitcoins.

The results of this study were presented in Zurich, during the Advances in Financial Techonology conference. The investigation team consists of researchers from the Austrian Institute of Technology and the security provider GoSecure.

For the study, the team sampled a population of email spam, discovering that the extortion process turned out to be fast, easy and quite lucrative. It should be noted that in almost all cases, criminals had no incriminating information on extorted victims.

One of the team’s discoveries is the highly lucrative use of botnet by extortionists, who rent it for $ 10,000 a month and make a profit of at least $ 130,000. On this matter, GoSecure’s Masarah Paquet-Cloutson said that the spam campaign is…