Four years jail for a voyeur webcam hacker

Sophos reports that he 47-year-old man from Cyprus has been given a four year jail sentence after hacking a teenage girl’s webcam in order to take illicit pictures of the young woman in her bedroom.

According to reports, the man, who has not been named but is a computer technician, spied on the then 17-year-old girl through her webcam after infecting her PC with a spyware Trojan horse that he sent to her as an email attachment.  The middle-aged hacker took compromising photos of the teenager while she was alone in her bedroom for an extended period of time without her knowledge, and then threatened to send the pictures to her email contacts unless she posed naked in front of the webcam.  The girl refused and the police were contacted, resulting in the man’s arrest in 2005.

Sophos notes that there have been other cases in the past where hackers have taken remote control of innocent users’ webcams in order to spy upon them, and that the problem of poorly-defended PCs does not just affect young home users, but workers too.