Whereby
Israeli cyber researchers from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem have revealed a way in which sexual predators are going after victims. They uncovered a malicious attack that sexual predators use to access webcams and record child pornography using a Zoom Whereby, to gain complete control of the child’s webcam.
You are not paranoid if people really are out to get you. And so all of those people who are scared to use a computer camera or do video chats or use Zoom may very well be right about it.
The research, which appeared on The Conversation academic website, was conducted between October, 2021 and May, 2022 by Eden Kamar, a Ph.D. candidate in cybersecurity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr. C. Jordan Howell, a cybercrime expert at the University of South Florida. Kamar and Howell teamed up to learn how pedophiles are preying on young children in the U.S. and globally.
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“Most prior studies rely on historical data from police reports, which provides an outdated depiction of the current threat landscape,” Kamar says. “We are the first to deploy chatbots to extract actionable intelligence regarding the methods currently used to facilitate online sexual abuse of children.”
The researchers explain that predators use webcams more often to engage in technology-facilitated sexual abuse to record pornography. They use malware to compromise a child’s computer system and gain webcam access, while phishing sites are used to harvest personal information, aiding the predator in victimizing their target. For example, phishing attacks can give a predator access to the password to a child’s computer, which could be used to access and remotely control the child’s camera.
To examine active predators, the researchers used automated, fictitious chatbot accounts called “honeypots” disguised as a 13-year-old girl. These accounts were deployed in various chatrooms to observe online predators’ activity and study their behavioral patterns. The chatbots never initiated conversations and were programmed to first find out the offender’s age by inquiring about the user’s age, sex, and location, so the researchers could ensure the chatbot only responded to users who identified as 18 or older.
The chatbot logged 953 conversations with online predators. Nearly two fifths (39%) of the conversations included an unsolicited link. Using forensic assessment, the researchers found that 19% (71 links) were embedded with malware, 5% (18 links) led to phishing websites, and 41% (154 links) were associated with the Whereby conferencing platform, operated by a company in Norway.
“Further investigation of the Whereby platform revealed that it is designed to allow meeting hosts to completely control the meeting visitor’s camera, turning it on and off, ‘without argument,’” Kamar says. “Predators exploit this feature to attempt to control children’s webcams without their consent.”
“Since awareness is the first step toward safe cyberspace, we are reporting these attacks and have alerted Whereby, so parents and policymakers can protect and educate an otherwise vulnerable population,” the researchers conclude.
