Submission + - Meet the Men Who Spy on Women Through Their Webcams
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Nate Anderson has an-depth article in Ars Technica about remote administration tools (RAT) and "ratters," young men who invade someone's machine, rifle through their personal files, and silently watch them from behind their own screen. Many operate quite openly online in public forums like "Hack Forum," sharing the best techniques for picking up new "female slaves." "Most of my slaves are boring," writes one aspiring ratter. "Wish I could get some more girls with webcams. It makes it more exciting when you can literally spy on someone. Even if they aren't getting undressed!" RAT tools aren't new; the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow famously released an early one called BackOrifice at the Defcon hacker convention in 1998 but today a cottage industry exists to build sophisticated RAT tools like BlackShades to control dozens or even hundreds of remote computers. Building an army of slaves isn't particularly complicated either; ratters simply need to trick their targets into running a file. This is commonly done by seeding file-sharing networks with infected files and naming them after popular songs or movies. One of the biggest problems ratters face is the increasing prevalence of webcam lights that indicate when the camera is in use. Entire threads are devoted to bypassing the lights, which routinely worry RAT victims and often lead to the loss of slaves. To combat detection, ratters compile lists of laptop models which don't have webcam lights and then taking special pains to verify the make and model of slave laptops to see if they are on the list. RATs aren't going away, despite the occasional intervention of the authorities. Too many exist, plenty of them are entirely legal, and source code is in the wild. If you are unlucky enough to have your computer infected with a RAT, prepare to be sold or traded to the kind of person who enters forums to ask, "Can I get some slaves for my rat please? I got 2 bucks lol I will give it to you :b" At that point, the indignities you will suffer—and the horrific website images you may see—will be limited only by the imagination of that most terrifying person: a 14-year-old boy with an unsupervised Internet connection."