A Japanese cyber extortion gang is running a new "name to shame" scam by duping users who pirate adult games into installing malware, then demanding that they pay up to keep their names from being publicly posted on the Web, a researcher said today.
The scheme is a new one in the world of "ransomware," the practice of mucking with users' files then extorting money to release them back to their rightful owners, said Rik Ferguson, a senior security researcher with Trend Micro's U.K. office.
Dramatically Reduce WAN Costs with Adaptive Private Networking: View nowAccording to Trend Micro, whose researchers in both Japan and the U.K. have analyzed the attack, extortionists seeded a Trojan horse onto a popular Japanese file-sharing service called Winny, which has an estimated 200 million users. The malware posed as installers for adult games in the Hentai genre, a pornographic form of anime.
