The United Kingdom has sent a man to prison for spying on teenagers and stealing sexually explicit photos.
A Nottingham man has been jailed after being accused of hacking into the computers and phones of dozens of people, including teenagers, for two years and spying on them using remote access trojans (RATs).
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How did the defendant act?
Robert Davies, 32, used fake social media profiles and Skype accounts to contact his victims (catfishing). He would then compromise their devices by sending malicious links that allowed him to infect the devices with RATs (designed to evade malware detection tools).
“ He then used the RATs to gain remote access to the devices and steal sexually explicit images (mainly of women) stored there ,” the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said in a press release
“In at least one case, he used his illegal access to spy on a teenage girl through her webcam, turning the encounter into a series of obscene images“.
The 32-year-old was also found to have been a customer of “We Leak Info,” a large online marketplace that claimed to provide access to around 12.5 billion files stolen from data breaches. However, law enforcement authorities were able to shut down the marketplace in January 2020.
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Davies exploited his access to the computers and phones of teenagers and other victims to spy on and steal photos, with the aim of creating a large collection of indecent images of adults and children (investigators recovered dozens of photos and videos of children while analyzing data on the seized computer).
The NCA learned about Davies and his illegal activity when investigators spotted him purchasing various “cybercrime tools” online, including RATs and crypters that he used to hack and remotely gain access to his victims’ devices.
26 months in prison for hacking and spying on 30 people
According to the NCA, the 32-year-old was in possession of a range of tools used by cybercriminals.
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“Not only did he use these tools to hack into people's devices, he also used them to spy on his unsuspecting victims and steal their nude images for his own sexual gratification. Even more disturbing is the fact that at least one of his victims was a teenager, and we found a collection of child sexual abuse images and videos on his computer“.
Davies was sentenced this week to 26 months in prison after pleading guilty to 24 offences of the Computer Misuse Act, possession and creation of indecent images of children/teenagers and possession of extreme pornographic images.
Source: Bleeping Computer
