Computer Forensics

It is said that the original term blackmail started on the borders of England and Scotland. Landowners in England used the term meaning payments made for protection from thieves and marauders in the Scottish Borders.  You may have even heard of blackmail in movies or on TV. Portrayed as this glamorous thing where someone is trying to get something from another person. In reality, blackmail is a serious crime that can have major consequences for both the victim and the perpetrator. If you’re a victim of Instagram blackmail or any other type of internet scam, it’s important to understand the ins and outs of the crime so that you can protect yourself.

What is Blackmail?

Blackmail is essentially extorting someone for money or information. The perpetrator threatens to release damaging information about the victim unless they are paid off. 

This could be anything from blackmailing someone for financial gain to releasing private photos or videos as leverage. 

In some cases, the information that is being used to blackmail someone may not even be true. However, the threat of the damage that could be done is enough to make the victim comply with the demands of the perpetrator. Some examples are listed below. Why is blackmail a crime? Because it’s illegal

Examples:

• Someone who threatens to harm a victim’s family unless the plaintiff drops the lawsuit.
• When a person threatens to keep quiet about an extramarital affair in exchange for money.
• A threat to divulge embarrassing information, photos, or videos to obtain money.
• Using your feelings as a means of controlling your behavior or persuading you to see things their way describes emotional blackmail.

Is Blackmail a Federal Crime? 

Yes, blackmail is a crime. Even if you get an email blackmailed, it can be still a ground for putting someone in

Online extortion is a serious problem that is becoming more and more common. If you have been a victim of online extortion, you are not alone. In this blog post, we will define online extortion, discuss some common scenarios, and offer some tips on what to do if you find yourself in this situation. 

What is Internet Extortion? 

In short, Internet extortion is when someone threatens to release information or take action that will cause you harm unless you pay them money or meet some other demand. The information or action that the extortionist threatens to take can be anything that would damage your reputation or cause you financial harm. For example, an online extortionist may threaten to release embarrassing photos or videos unless you pay them $500. 

Common Scenarios of Online Extortion Scams   

There are many different ways that online extortion can play out. Some common scenarios include: 

• Theft of sensitive data such as customer information or company secrets: In this scenario, the extortionist may threaten to release the stolen data to the public unless you pay them a ransom.  
• DDoS attacks: In a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, the attacker inundates your website with so much traffic that it crashes. The attacker may then demand payment to stop the attack and allow your website to come back online.  

• Malware attacks: In this type of attack, the attacker infects your computer with malware that either locks you out of your system or encrypts your files. The attacker will then demand payment for you to regain access to your system or files. 
• Social Media Attacks: In this scenario, extortionists, or sextortionists, create dozens of catfish profiles and flirt their way into getting their victims to exchange explicit content, then threaten to expose them online if they do not receive

Snapchat is a messaging app that allows users to send pictures and videos that disappear after a certain amount of time. This makes it a popular app for sexting, as the images sent are not permanent. If you faced with blackmail on snapchat, the common question is What To Do If Someone Blackmails You on Snapchat

However, recent reports have shown that Snapchat can be used for more nefarious means – like online blackmail. If someone threatens to release compromising photos or videos of you unless you do what they want, what should you do? Read on for advice.

Can You Be Blackmailed on Snapchat?

Snapchat is a beneficial app blackmailers can use for many reasons including:

There is no telling who is messaging you.

• Quick way to send messages, videos, photos

They can screenshot or screen record your photos or videos.

• You can easily delete their threats and messages after review
• Users can see locations

Your blackmailer can see where you are at all times and play into the scare mongering.

In short, yes people faced with blackmail on Snapchat. Using these features, cybercriminals can lure in their victims, manipulate them into sending explicit content, and ultimately threaten them with exposure if they don’t get what they demand.

What To Do If Someone is Blackmailing You Online

Here are some simple steps you can take to protect yourself from a blackmailer and keep your harasser at bay until you seek professional help from the police and cyber-crime specialists.

1. Document every interaction you’ve had with your harasser, this includes photos, videos, messages, call logs, etc.
2. Find a support system in family and close friends, victims of blackmail need all the support they can get.
3. Lock down your online presence that includes all of your social media accounts, bank accounts, business

Instagram can be a fun and casual platform to share photos and videos with friends. But it can also be a vehicle for blackmail.  What to Do If Someone Blackmails You on Instagram? Don’t worry, there are steps you can take to protect yourself. If someone threatens to expose intimate or embarrassing photos of you unless you comply with their demands, what should you do? Here are some tips.

Should You Block Your Blackmailer on Instagram?

Many sextortion victims have no idea what to do once they are faced with a blackmailer. It’s normal for a victims first instinct be to block their suspect and hope they will disappear. Unfortunately, that is not how sextortion works.

Once you are being sextorted on Instagram there is no way of hiding from your perpetrator. Sextortionists create hundreds of fake Instagram accounts so that they have multiple fake identifies they can utilize to lure in victims and in case their victim was to block them, they have many ways to reach out again.

There have also been devastating results due to blocking a sextortionists.

• Exposed content
• More aggressive threats and harassments
• Suspects reaching out to your loved ones, job, community groups
• Websites created claiming false and very damaging narratives about yourself

What to Do If Someone Blackmails You with Photos

If you are being blackmailed with images it’s important to document the threats. Make sure to take screenshots of every interaction you have had with your suspect, as well as their account, images, money transfers, etc.

You should also lock down all of your online accounts and make sure that they have strong privacy settings. This is especially important because your suspect will use your Instagram account to find out information about you and use it against you such as your friends list.

It can be a very frightening experience when you become the victim of blackmail. Your mind may race as you try to figure out what to do. You may feel like you are trapped and have no options. However, there are things that you can do to stop the blackmail and protect yourself. In this blog, we will discuss some steps how to stop someone from blackmailing you. That can help put an end to your blackmail.

How Does Blackmail Happen?

Blackmail can occur anywhere especially online due to the internet making it fairly easy to find people and their personal information. So how exactly do these cyber criminals go after their victims? Well, there are a few ways a blackmailer can grab ahold of your content.

Malware

Short for “malicious software” Malware is software intentionally designed to disrupt any device, and can gain control and unauthorized access to someone’s data. Malware can be installed into your device by phishing emails, fraudulent websites, adware, and much more.

Bots

Internet bots are software applications that run automated tasks over the internet and can interact with systems and users online and can even imitate human activity online, such as messaging. These bots can be programmed to hack into people’s accounts, scan for contact information online, and even send spam.

Catfish Profiles

The use of catfish profiles has become a popular way for blackmailers to get ahold of victims’ explicit content. The way it works is these blackmailers create dozens of catfish profiles on various social media platforms and reach out to people to start a romantic or sexual relationship. Once they are in, these criminals will coerce their victims into sending explicit content and then threaten to expose that content online if they do not receive compensation or more sexual favors.

How

New Westminster, B.C. –

A hard drive seized from the home of the Dutch man accused of harassing British Columbia teenager Amanda Todd contained a deleted bookmark to child pornography depicting her, a Crown attorney told B.C. Supreme Court on Friday.

Louise Kenworthy told the jury trial of Aydin Coban that previous expert testimony showed Todd’s name and several of the online aliases used to harass her were also found on a second hard drive seized when Dutch police arrested Coban in 2014.

Coban has pleaded not guilty to extortion, harassment, communication with a young person to commit a sexual offence and possessing child pornography.

Kenworthy said she expects to finish the Crown’s closing arguments on Tuesday, when she said she would talk about an online account that was active on a computer just five minutes before police arrested Coban at his home and then seized the device.

She said evidence has shown the account was operated by the same person behind another account, under the guise of a young woman, that harassed Todd.

There was no witness to say, “I saw Aydin Coban typing messages on his computer to Amanda Todd” or that they saw Coban in possession of child pornography depicting the teen, Kenworthy told the jury on Friday.

But his guilt was the only inference the jury could draw from the testimony of more than 30 witnesses and binders full of 80 exhibits, she said.

She took the jury to testimony from a B.C. RCMP expert in digital forensics, who last month told the court about finding a folder bearing Todd’s name that had been deleted from a web browser on one of the seized devices.

The folder had contained links to the profiles of a number of

FIU experts are training local high school teachers to develop cybersecurity lesson plans for their students.

The Cybernet Miami Academy is an FIU-led virtual, interactive program about digital forensics, which is the process of interpreting and uncovering electronic data. 

In the first phase of the academy this summer, high school teachers met with FIU electrical and computer engineering faculty and cybersecurity professionals to learn skills, gather resources and build lesson plans. They learned how to extract hidden information from hard drives, accumulated free cybersecurity tools and planned activities for their information technology and career-learning classrooms. 

The teachers are now preparing for the second phase of the program: implementing their lessons. 

“Teachers are leaving with at least one lesson plan that they have customized to best fit their students,” says Alexander Pons, principal investigator of Cybernet Miami Academy and a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at FIU’s College of Engineering and Computing. 

The teachers earned $1,000 to complete FIU’s 80-hour training course. They will receive another $1,000 after conducting their lesson plans. The program is funded by a U.S. Department of Education grant and delegated to FIU via Luminary Labs. 

FIU customized the program to be effective for high school classrooms. In the first phase, one speaker was a cybersecurity education expert who discussed how teachers might best tailor their lessons for teenagers. Another speaker from the National Initiative for Cyber Education explained the career opportunities in cybersecurity. According to Cyber Seek, there were 714,548 cybersecurity-related job listings in the U.S. from May 2021 through April 2022. 

The academy also provided insights into digital forensics techniques. FIU personnel covered computer programming, security issues and information storage. An expert from the Global Forensic and Justice Center at FIU gave teachers an inside look at the industry.

“Since we spent

The Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) is investing about $900,000 in nine experiential learning projects, covering election security, privacy protection, and digital forensics research areas.

“The newly funded experiential learning projects highlight how widespread and varied cybersecurity concerns have become,” said Luiz DaSilva, CCI executive director. “By giving students hands-on experiences needed for careers in this ever-growing field, we hope to make significant contributions to building a strong cybersecurity workforce for Virginia and the nation.” 

Along with innovation and research, workforce development is a key driver of CCI’s mission. The Virginia Tech-led initiative encompasses a network of 41 Virginia higher education institutes with more than 320 researchers working at the intersection of security, autonomous systems, and intelligence. 

This is the third year that CCI has funded experiential learning programs. These projects are led by researchers at:

Learn more about the funded projects: 

Project: Cyber Startups: CCI 2022 Scalable Pilot Programs for Experiential Learning

• Principal Investigator: Gisele Stolz, director of entrepreneurship and innovation programs, Office of Innovation and Economic Development, George Mason University

Project: Digital Forensics Experiential Learning Program with Virginia State Police

• Principal Investigator: Irfan Ahmed, associate professor, computer science, Virginia Commonwealth University

Project: Disinformation as Data Poisoning

• Principal Investigator: Daniel Runfola, assistant professor, applied sciences, College of William & Mary
• Co-principal investigator: Anthony Stefanidis, professor, computer science, College of William & Mary

Project: Enhancing Experiential Learning via Technology Enabled Internships with Mentoring: Phase 2 Implementation

• Principal Investigator: Jeff Pittges, professor, IMPACT Lab, Radford University
• Co-principal investigators: Deri Draper-Amason, research assistant professor, VMASC, Old Dominion University
• Bobby Keener, CEO, CivilianCyber
• Rob Schaper, executive vice president, CivilianCyber

Project: Expanded Scalable Pilot Program for Experiential Learning in CCI Through the Commonwealth STEM Industry Internship Program

• Principal Investigator: Mary Sandy, director, Virginia Space Grant Consortium, Old Dominion University

Project: Future Cyber Security Educators: Empowering

Americans lost over USD 4 billion to cyberattacks in 2020 (McCarthy, 2021). Along with this rise in internet crime, advances in anti-forensic techniques have added new layers of complexity for digital forensic investigators.

Anti-forensic techniques are designed to prevent individuals who commit cyberattacks from being discovered. In this article, we’ll explain the five anti-forensic techniques that present the most significant challenges for today’s digital forensic investigators

1. Disk Wiping

The first technique is disk wiping: deleting all of the data on a hard drive or media storage device. Anti-forensic tools can be used to erase the contents of a drive, making it difficult for forensic analysts to recover the data. Drive Wiper, for example, is a Windows-based tool that offers the option to wipe a drive securely, erasing the data beyond recovery. Likewise, File Shredder is a Java-based tool that can overwrite files to prevent recovery.

2. File Encryption

The second technique is file encryption, or the process of transforming readable data into an unreadable format using various encryption algorithms. While encrypting files is an effective way to protect them from prying eyes, anti-forensic tools can also be used to encrypt files with the intent of making them difficult to access or decode.

3. Steganography

The third technique is steganography (National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2018). Steganography is the process of hiding messages or files within another file. Anti-forensic tools like Hidden Tear and Stego Watch can be used to hide information in images, audio, and video, among other file types, so that it is difficult for forensic analysts to uncover. Hidden Tear is a Windows-based tool that can hide files within .jpeg, .gif, and .bmp images. Stego Watch is a Java-based tool that can be used to embed hidden information in .jpeg, .gif, and .png image formats.

A three-year grant totaling $500,622 has been awarded to Dr. Ahmed Aleroud, associate professor in the Augusta University School of Computer and Cyber Sciences and principal investigator of the grant. Dr. Craig Albert, director of the Master of Arts in Intelligence and Security Studies program in Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, will serve as senior personnel.

The grant from the Office of Naval Research’s Social Networks and Computational Social Science Program will fund a project that creates new algorithms to mitigate social cyberattacks in Arabic-speaking countries. According to the faculty, the impact of this project is critical and will advance cybersecurity intelligence and digital forensics research.

“In the era of social media, social media cyberattacks are carried out by one or more actors — including both bots and human users — by engaging other users to create influence campaigns to polarize topic-oriented groups through sets of content-based and centrality-based intentional cyber-mediated methods,” said Aleroud. “This project will test recent deep-learning methods such as adversarial models to detect and assess the impacts of such attacks, even on multimedia content such as images or videos.”

According to the grant proposal, recent studies have shown that misinformation is spreading in 25 different languages, leading to deaths and injuries. Studies have also shown several attempts to discredit the power of U.S. governmental institutions through the spreading of misinformation on social media.

The project will focus on the Arabic language, which is one of the 10 most-spoken languages in the world. While some researchers have investigated diverse forms of language-based attacks in Arabic, limited attention is paid to studying social-mediated cyberattacks and their influences on the targeted countries, which include the U.S., Albert said.

“We will use machine-learning techniques to detect social cyberattacks such as rumors, conspiracy theories, mis- and dis-information, cyber-bots,

Tue, Jul 5th 2022 11:25 am

Initiative, which merges a broad range of STEM & non-STEM disciplines, will build multidisciplinary research teams, develop digital literacy tools and new teaching techniques

By the University at Buffalo

Siwei Lyu, a University at Buffalo Empire Innovation Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, clearly saw the problem. Misinformation and disinformation had so polluted social media platforms that untrained users in many cases couldn’t distinguish fact from fiction, or just didn’t care to do so.

But his background as a computer scientist could help restore truth to the top of newsfeeds.

Lyu’s expertise in deepfakes, digital forensics and machine learning could stop online disinformation at the source before its damaging effects could further erode trust across the social media landscape. This was a technical problem that demanded a technical solution. It was simply a matter of deploying the algorithms he helped develop as authentication instruments capable of countering the opposing algorithms responsible for spreading lies.

But the journalists on the front lines of digital media didn’t embrace Lyu’s technical innovations. They knew that identifying fakes wasn’t enough. Users could unwittingly spread sensationalized fiction and bogus accounts with curatorial algorithms that amplified fakery by targeting those who (turning the aphorism on its head) might find fiction stranger (more entertaining or believable) than truth ─ and it doesn’t take much to turn a fundamental truth into a spicy online falsehood.

“The truth isn’t always the most interesting thing on social media. Truth is essential, but it can sometimes be boring,” says Lyu, who began to see more broadly the problem’s complexity.

Online disinformation is as much a human problem as a technical one. Its roots reach into social, cultural and psychological realms, according to Lyu, extending upon the wisdom expressed in a classic article from the journal

Accelerated online degrees for working adults allow enrollees to attend college without cutting their work hours. They save time and money on commuting and parking expenses — and may even spend less on tuition. 

This guide leads you through 10 examples of accelerated degree types you can earn online. Graduating may increase your career opportunities, make a shift to a different field, or earn higher salaries.

What to expect in an accelerated online degree program

Reputable, accredited accelerated bachelor’s degree programs mirror their on-campus counterparts. They offer the same quality of curriculum, instructors, and post-graduation career outcomes. 

The main differences center on the ability to learn and study at your own pace and finish much sooner than you would in an in-person classroom setting. 

Classes will most likely be asynchronous. You’ll use discussion boards to interact with professors and other students. 

Some programs may require synchronous meetings, in-person internships, or on-campus residencies. These typically take place on weekends or in the evenings to accommodate work schedules.  

Program lengths average two years for most degrees. It is sometimes possible to graduate earlier with self-discipline, time management, and motivation. 

10 best accelerated online degrees for working adults

To compile this list of accelerated online degrees for working adults, we considered the career interests of ZDNet readers, then scoured the web to find programs in those fields that typically offer:

• Self-paced or compressed learning
• Accommodations for working adults
• Preparation for advancement opportunities or new directions

Our curated list of accelerated online bachelor’s degrees for working adults includes programs in business, engineering, computer science, information technology, and public service. All aim to help graduates stay relevant and in demand over the coming decades. 

Degrees are listed alphabetically.

1. Business administration

Accelerated business administration degrees can be completed in 16-36 months. They

Louisiana State University is gearing up to expand its cybersecurity programming to train participants to defend against large-scale attacks on enterprise and control systems.

According to a news release, a $350,000 grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents Cybersecurity Talent Initiative Fund and $100,000 from industry partners is contributing to the next stage of LSU’s FIREStarter program, an initiative established last year with the launch of a lab for cyber range exercises simulating real-time cyber attacks. The announcement said the new funding will go toward digital forensics and industrial control systems technologies, expanding the university’s cybersecurity course offerings, and future research on industrial control systems security.

LSU’s computer science professor Golden Richard III, principal investigator on the project and director of LSU’s Applied Cybersecurity Lab, said in a public statement that the new lab will be an entirely hands-on experience.

“We will be putting the same software and hardware components in the lab that digital forensics practitioners use on a day-to-day basis to work real cases. It’s our anticipation that every student in the cybersecurity concentration, plus any other interested computer science students [and possibly more from other disciplines], will have the opportunity to be exposed to state-of-the-art hardware and software tools for digital forensics and industrial control systems,” Richard said. “From the industrial control systems [side], we will have both equipment for teaching students the basics of programming PLCs, as well as small-scale ‘simulations’ of real industrial control systems, e.g., a water-treatment plant, power plant, etc. These are really cool and on roll-away carts, with the real hardware tucked inside. This means that you can formulate real attacks and defenses and see if they work.”

According to the announcement, the FIREStarter 2 funding comes shortly after LSU President William Tate IV launched LSU’s Scholarship First Agenda, which aims to