Using shame to enable extortion

When we look at ‘sextortion’ and ’email based extortion’ tactics used by threat actors we see a common pattern, one that leverages shame & fear. I’ve worked with some victims of this and it’s really not nice for them, the impacts are not just financial, they are emotional and sometimes more. It’s fortunately (for me) don’t however deal with this in volume, however I wanted to highlight something, the similarities between extortion and what I would describe as ‘Security Scanning’ shame scamming. Now you might think, that’s a massive leap… but bear with me, I’ve been looking at this (CTI/OSINT) plus working with ‘victims’ for years…

I’ll be posting about some research I’ve done on DNSSEC shortly too, I’ve kind of figured this topic was over years ago, but it’s recently come back on my radar, you know sometimes ‘duty calls’. But let’s look at shame based extortion patterns for now:

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