If you’re like my uncle who has a piece of duct tape over his webcam, you’re probably just as terrified of being spied on and having footage leaked onto the internet by hackers. At Black Hat 2015 in Las Vegas, it’s been revealed that “Remote Access Trojans” are the aids of hackers who are stealing intimate video footage and uploading it to YouTube for profit.

“The report, which was released at the Black Hat conference, describes how hackers known as ‘ratters’ use a special kind of malware called a remote access trojan, or RAT, to gain access to a victim’s computer and control their webcams,” according to Motherboard. 

“Trojans account for 70 percent of all malware online today, and the easiest to use are RATs, the report states.”

When a vlogger or one of you famous YouTube personalties uploads a photo, they make money off of the advertisements and traffic that is generated through that video. Now think about the seedy environment that exists online and how much traffic intimate photos of women would generate, especially on a platform like YouTube. Well, that’s how hackers who use RAT’s are getting rich.

“A video of a young woman in front of her computer, presumably oblivious to the ratter’s surveillance, can rack up hundreds of thousands of views—and the associated ad revenue,” according to the report.

“This kind of activity is nothing new, unfortunately, although the Digital Citizens Alliance’s report is comprehensive. In 2013, a hacker by the name of Jared James Abraham was sentenced to federal prison for trying to extort Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf with webcam footage he obtained with RAT malware.”

The dangers for countless amounts of women on the internet face is yet another lapse in online security. The tricky part is figuring out what order these security flaws are dealt with, being that they are so plentiful.

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