From Daily Yomiuri Online comes the story of a couple of hackers who didn’t feel that regular run-of-the-mill identity theft was really enough. After slipping a trojan into an adult computer game, and then putting it up on file sharing websites, the two men found themselves with the personal information of a whole bunch of people who play sex games.
What to do, what to do… How about: solicit money in exchange for not leaking that the person plays sex games to the internet?
Well when you put it that way…
The men responsible were arrested this month after taking in a haul of a couple hundred dollars. They were charging their victims $63 a pop, and they’d managed to hack $5,000 computers, according to Daily Yomiuri.
According to the MPD sources, in November the two allegedly defrauded several people of several tens of thousands of yen by concealing a virus in an adult computer game. The two created a system that infects a computer with the virus when its user downloads the game via file-sharing software such as Winny.
The two men would then allegedly tell the victims that the leaked information could be deleted from the Internet in exchange for a 5,800 yen fee.
About 5,000 people’s personal computers are believed to have been infected with the virus, named Kenzo, which Oka allegedly developed at the request of the younger man.
When a computer is infected with the virus, its user’s personal information–including name, address, e-mail address, telephone number and browsing records–are leaked on the Internet.
Needless to say, this isn’t a particularly stellar record, but it does mark the first time that Japanese authorities have arrested someone for committing fraud by use of computer virus.
(Daily Yomiuri via Kotaku.)
