Sextortionist Campaigns Get Personal, Creative to Force Payouts

Cisco Talos and Barracuda analyzed resurgent sextortion spam campaigns that used publicly leaked credentials and social-engineering (claims of compromising videos, infidelity, even paid murder plots) to demand $1,000–$7,000 in Bitcoin; researchers intercepted over 233,000 messages sent to ~15,826 unique recipients, observed ~58,611 unique BTC wallets and geographically distributed sending IPs concentrated in several countries, but found a very low success rate (under 0.05%) and limited total confirmed payments (wallet balances analyzed totaling roughly $146k).