On the massive complaints about online extortionists in the northern capital of law enforcement agencies have paid attention in March this year. If the winter a week reported on the strength of 2 - 3 applications, then in the spring of their number was as high as 20 - 30 in the last 7 days. Some simple calculations indicate an approximate figure - 300. The percentage of latency in the field of crime allows the police to think that the potential number of victims is more than six thousand people in the last three months.

On human weaknesses underworld could ever make, especially in the most timid of them - fear of being publicly condemned, or worse - ridiculed. As noted in the police of St. Petersburg, what comes to them on a weekly basis for two or three dozen victims, drop in the bucket compared to the actual volumes of sex blackmail.

By itself, the scheme, which is used by extortionists, is not new. With create fake accounts in social networks victim comes her own photos in the nude, which was stored in a closed or album, or on electronic media associated with the cloud service. And while looking for the fair sexleakage, it extends the requirement for payment of silence. This offers an alternative villain: 5 thousand rubles or sexual services.

With the male part of the population is also used as the old computer world trap. Communication on "Skype" with a beautiful stranger and virtual acquaintance with the delights of each other inevitably leads to the minute of reckoning: the prices are the same. Five thousand or publicity - everyone chooses for himself.

In St. Petersburg police are convinced that out of 100 people have been subjected to this kind of blackmail, only five written statements. Checking law enforcement rests on the Ukrainian IP-address. Exciting clear grouse no hurry.

Interestingly, victims users try not to pay not only the police, but to the social network's administration. According to "Fontanka" the press service of "VKontakte" surge of complaints and appeals in support of this issue, they do not see:

"It's quite an old problem that is relevant to all of the Internet as a whole. Compromising information fraudsters often receive via social engineering psame - hacking user accounts. Taking this opportunity, we recommend our users to pay more attention to the security of its own pages, including two-factor authentication in the account settings and send compromising information to strangers. "

Of course, the best way to avoid the trap - forget about the cheese. If no temptation to overcome, it would be nice to take care of "network contraception." Anti-virus expert "Kaspersky Lab" Sergei Lozhkyn believes that the loss of confidential information occurs most often due to user carelessness: "Basically hacking occurs through unauthorized access to mail that has been linked to any service. And access to the email account user intruders can get in several different ways, most often it is phishing emails containing malicious links. Turning on a link, the victim enters their data from a fake account on the site, and they fall straight into the wrong hands. In addition, access to the account fraudsters can floorchit in several different ways: by using special malware intercepted Wi-Fi-traffic, attacks on the servers that store confidential information of users. To avoid getting the confidential information stored on your computer or smartphone, in the wrong hands - store it in encrypted form. One of the most convenient for today for the encryption of files on your computer making - is to create a "container" that can be seen in the system as a single disk. On this drive you can store or copy any information from him, you can work from anywhere in the program, it is not much different from the flash drive or hard drive partition. "