Arrest made in Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf 'sextortion' case

A college student was arrested Thursday for allegedly hijacking the webcams of young women -- among them reigning Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf -- taking nude images, then blackmailing his victims to send him more explicit material or else be exposed.

Jared James Abrahams, a 19-year-old computer science student from Temecula, California, surrendered on Thursday to the FBI on federal extortion charges, the agency announced. Authorities say he victimized young women surreptitiously, by taking control of their computers then photographing them as they changed out of their clothes.

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Arrest made in Miss Teen USA ‘Sextortion photos’ case

TEMECULA, Calif. — A college student was arrested Thursday for allegedly hijacking the webcams of young women — among them reigning Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf — taking nude images, then blackmailing his victims to send him more explicit material or else be exposed.

Jared James Abrahams, a 19-year-old computer science student from Temecula, California, surrendered on Thursday to the FBI on federal extortion charges, the agency announced. Authorities say he victimized young women surreptitiously, by taking control of their computers then photographing them as they changed out of their clothes.

When he admitted what he’d done in June, Abrahams said he had 30 to 40 “slave computers” — or other people’s electronic devices he controlled — and has had as many as 150 total, according to a criminal complaint.

His arrest came six months after a teenager identified in court documents as C.W. alerted authorities. She has since publicly identified herself as Cassidy Wolf, the recently crowned Miss Teen USA. She touted news reports of her alleged tormenter’s arrest on her Twitter feed.

At the time she contacted police, in March, Wolf was not a national figure — even though she was Miss Teen California — and lived in an apartment and attended Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

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Webcam spying goes mainstream as Miss TEEN USA describes hack

Webcam hacking has officially gone mainstream with yesterday's revelation that the new Miss Teen USA, Cassidy Wolf, was the victim of a "sextortion" plot in which someone slipped Remote Administration Tool (RAT) software onto her computer and used it to snap (apparently nude) pictures of Wolf in her room. "I wasn’t aware that somebody was watching me (on my webcam)," she told The Today Show. "The light (on the camera) didn’t even go on, so I had no idea."

Wolf said that the hacker tried to extort her, threatening to release the pictures publicly if she didn't follow his demands. The FBI has admitted that it is investigating the case and eventually said that it has identified a suspect.

The story itself isn't remarkable—indeed, earlier this year I documented an entire community of RAT users who gather to share tips and pictures of the "slaves" whose machines they have infected—but these kinds of sextortion plots have to date been covered largely in the tech press and in local papers. (Though GQ ran a fine story on sextortionist Luis Mijangos in early 2012 that's well worth a read). Wolf has now taken the story onto the morning TV talk shows, and her interviewers appear to be amazed that such hacks are even possible.

In doing interviews this week for my new book, The Internet Police, many of the questions have focused on sextortion and the use of RAT software. These hacks are such a profound privacy violation—accessing webcams, microphones, and stored files provides the attacker with almost unfettered access to one's private life, thoughts, documents, even conversations—that they routinely generate amazement in interlocutors. As one TV host put it after hearing Wolf's story this week, "Just—wow, that is creepy... Can you believe that?" Or, as a Jezebel writer put it today, "webcam hacking—WHICH I CANNOT BELIEVE IS A REAL THING OH MY GOD."

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