Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams

--Snip

“i enjoy messing with my girl slaves”

"Man I feel dirty looking at these pics," wrote one forum poster at Hack Forums, one of the top "aboveground" hacking discussion sites on the Internet (it now has more than 23 million total posts). The poster was referencing a 134+ page thread filled with the images of female "slaves" surreptitiously snapped by hackers using the women's own webcams. "Poor people think they are alone in their private homes, but have no idea they are the laughing stock on HackForums," he continued. "It would be funny if one of these slaves venture into learning how to hack and comes across this thread."

Whether this would in fact be "funny" is unlikely. 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.

"I just use the file manager feature of my RAT in whatever one im using and in [a RAT called] cybergate I use the search feature to find those jpgs [JPEG image files] that are 'hidden' unless u dig and dig and dig," wrote one poster. "A lot of times the slave will download pics from their phone or digital camera and I watch on the remote desktop to see where they save em to and that's usually where you'll find the jackpot!"

Women who have this done to them, especially when the spying escalates into blackmail, report feeling paranoia. One woman targeted by the California "sextortionist" Luis Mijangos wouldn't leave her dorm room for a week after Mijangos turned her laptop into a sophisticated bugging device. Mijangos began taunting her with information gleaned from offline conversations.

...

Building an army of slaves isn't particularly complicated; ratters simply need to trick their targets into running a file. This is commonly done by seeding file-sharing networks with infected files and naming them after popular songs or movies, or through even more creative methods. "I seem to get a lot of female slaves by spreading Sims 3 with a [RAT] server on torrent sites," wrote one poster. Another turned to social media, where "I've been able to message random hot girls on facebook (0 mutual friends) and infect (usually become friends with them too); with the right words anything is possible."


http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/rat-breeders-meet-the-men-who-spy-on-women-through-their-webcams/