How the UK jails Man for Surveillance on Youngsters, hijacking Pictures Utilizing RATs?

A man from Nottingham was jailed recently for more than two years after seizing the computer and phones of multiples of victims, some of them are underage, and spying on them utilizing remote access Trojans (RATs). A 32-year-old Robert Davies utilized was fake online social media profiles and Skype accounts for catfishing his victims and hijacking their devices by sending the links that permitted him to affect them with RATs obfuscated utilizing the crypters which permitted the malicious tools to evade anti-malware detection tools.

“Furthermore he used the RATs to gain the remote access to their devices and hijack any sexual images majorly the females they had preserved on there,” the UK National Crime Agency said in a press release.

How did he Spy on Teens?

“On at least one occasion, he used his illegal access to spy on a teenage girl through her webcam, turning the encounter into a number of indecent images.” He was also a “We Leak Info” customer, a large online marketplace that claimed to provide access to roughly 12.5 billion records stolen from data breaches before being taken down by law enforcement in January 2020.

Davies used his access to victims’ computers and phones to steal and build an extensive collection of indecent images of adults and children (investigators recovered dozens of pictures and videos of children while analyzing data on his seized computer). 

Davies only landed on NCA’s radar after investigators spotted him buying various cybercrime tools online, including the RATs and crypters he later used to compromise and remotely access his victims’ devices.

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Around 26 months of prison after hacking, spying on 30 people

“Davies had amassed what can only be described as a cyber criminal’s toolkit,” said Andrew Shorrock, Operations Manager from the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit. “Not only was he using these tools to break into peoples’ devices, but he was also using them to spy on his unsuspecting victims and to steal naked images of them for his own sexual gratification.

“Even more disturbing is the fact that at least one of his victims was a teenager and we found a collection of images and videos of child sexual abuse on his computer.” Davies was sentenced this week to 26 months in prison after pleading guilty to 24 Computer Misuse Act offenses, possessing and making indecent images of children, and possessing extreme pornographic images.

“In total NCA officers identified and visited over 30 victims of Davies throughout the course of the investigation,” the NCA added.

The sentence comes after being arrested three times over almost two years, between November 2019 and August 2021, each time being assessed for additional crimes as officers were investigating the information gathered from his machines.

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