Another one bites the dust, this time for spying on a teenage girl via webcam. 4 years is a reasonable sentence this time I think as the case borders on many offenses such as blackmail, indecent behaviour, infringement of privacy, unlawful access and probably a few more.

It was a pretty simple hack as it goes, a trojan and then straight forward access to the webcam – this case is the reason most security minded people cover their webcam with something just in case.

A 47-year-old computer technician has been jailed for four years after he hacked into a teenage girl’s webcam to spy on her.

The unnamed hacker used a Trojan horse virus to access the webcam remotely, which was passed on to the girl’s computer through an infected email.

Once he hacked into the webcam, he took images of her and threatened her with blackmail unless the teenager ‘posed’ indecently for him.

If he’d done it just for kicks and not tried to blackmail the poor girl he probably would have gotten away with it. Why do people have to be so greedy?

Human nature.

The news of the hacker comes from Sophos, the analysis centre for virus, spyware and spam, where the company reports that the man was arrested back in 2005, but has only been brought to justice this week.

Speaking about the court ruling, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said: “Most spyware is designed to steal your identity, your passwords, your banking information – but it is just as easy to program a Trojan horse to take over your webcam.”

“This case highlights that as well as malware being used for financial gain, it can also be used by voyeurs. Everyone needs to treat computer security as paramount importance to ensure they do not fall victim to an internet blackmailer or peeping tom.”

Most of the oldskool trojans like Back Orifice and DeepThroat came with capabilities to capture frames from the webcam, open and close the CD drive, invert the monitor display, pop up chat windows and many other ‘fun’ features.

I doubt this guy programmed anything himself, most likely he just downloaded something, bound it to something tempting and e-mailed it to the girl.

Source: Tech Radar (Thanks Navin)