Phishing, a very basic yet very widely successful method ofdoing online frauds in India, it’s a clever attack where an attacker takes awaycritical information using fake website or app and then use that information toexploit innocent people. With time cyber criminals develop new methods to dothis attack and here I am narrating one such Incident.
Incident:
So, one fine afternoon a gentleman came to my house. Hewas in a very uncomfortable state of mind struggling to find the words todefine his problem. Upon as politely he said that he is facing threat online.
He came into contact of a girl via messenger, she askedhim to do a video call and there she recorded his nude video and startedthreatening 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 thatif 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 hashelped us to stay connected with our loved once and even sometimes bless uswith some unexpected friendship. But as every coin has two sides there is alsosome things going on which is very bad.
This kind of things is being exploited in a wild waythese days. What generally happens a person posing as a beautiful girl willtalk to you nicely for few minutes and then will send you a link and will askyou to open it saying it’s a surprise for you and in excitement you open thatlink and you end up compromising your social media account.
Now here, the gender of a person is also questionablebecause there are many applications which can change the gender of your voicein real time.
The link which people send you is called phishing linkand it’s not new but now many people have started something called phishing asa service where they sell phishing kits to people which is ready to use andthis make this attack a very easy thing to do.
After this the person will lure you to come over videochat and will somehow pursuit you to go nude and that’s where you are introuble and the game of extortion starts.
How to stay safe?
Technical aspect:
· Activate two factor authentication in yoursocial media accounts there are many tutorials available on internet how to doso.
· Never share any otp associated to your socialmedia account with anyone.
· Keep your profile lock to avoid misuse of theinformation present on your social media.
Psychological aspect:
· Don’t lose your common sense and don’t doanything stupid which can ruin your reputation in the society.
· Avoid talking to the people whose socialmedia account is not looking natural.
· There is always a reason if someone you don’tknow suddenly start talking to you nicely out of nowhere, be aware!
· India being country of youth have very activehormonal 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 insociety behave in the same way there too.
Economical aspect:
· Most of the people in India are either fromMiddle class household or from a very poor household and this is a basis whythis type of things is happening. People looking for shortcuts to earn afortune is doing this type of stuffs and the people who are actually working honestlydo have work pressure, tension or frustration and because of all these theyfall in this trap and this is how the demand and supply bridge of this systemis working
About the author:
Name: Mudit Sinha(Cyber security trainer & DataAnalyst)
Trained police It cell Jalandhar and Border SecurityForces, Fareedkot on the topic of cyber security awareness.
Computer Science Engineering (LPU,Punjab)
Social Psychology (Wesleyan University, Coursera)
Macroeconomics (University of California, Irvine,Coursera)
