How hackers spy on women through their webcams

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:07:00 +0000

Ars Technica reported this weekend on how hackers have been spying on women through their webcams using RATs (remote administration tools). It's an unsettling read, revealing how "RAT operators have nearly complete control over the computers they infect; they can (and do) browse people's private pictures in search of erotic images to share with each other online. They even have strategies for watching where women store the photos most likely to be compromising."

The online community of RAT operators, "ratters," Ars Technica notes, is almost exclusively male. They share the fruits of the computers they compromise -- largely intimate images of women swiped from computer files or caught on webcam -- on aboveground hacker forums. They call the women they spy on "slaves."

RAT technology is not new, but has become vastly more sophisticated and undetectable by victims. As Ars Technica noted, ensnaring "slaves" is the easy part:

Did Hurricane Sandy give rise to mutant rats in NYC?

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:26:00 +0000

As reality sinks in and millions in the East Coast begin a slow recovery from Hurricane Sandy, New Yorkers ask the pressing, characteristically New York question: will the devastation spawn a super-breed of rats?

After consulting Bob Sullivan, the author of "Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants", the Daily Beast thinks yes: "Sandy isn’t likely to have put much of a dent in the city’s rat problem. If anything, the hurricane may have made things worse." The Daily Beast writes:

Salon.com > rats

How hackers spy on women through their webcams

Did Hurricane Sandy give rise to mutant rats in NYC?