Robert Davies was also one of the customers of now seized login credentials selling site WeLeakInfo.
A Byron Close, Nottingham man, identified as Robert Davies, has been sent to jail for two years and two months by a Nottingham Crown Court for spying on children and women using RATs (remote access trojans).
Case Details
The 32-year-old convict maintained a massive database of indecent images of victims he stole during 2010 and 2019. He used malware to gain remote access to his victims’ devices and accessed their data without their consent or knowledge.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) officials arrested Davies thrice between Nov 2019 and Aug 2021. Eventually, he was brought before the court in Sep 2021. He pleaded guilty to 24 Computer Misuse Act offences, three counts of possessing indecent images of children, voyeurism, making indecent images of children, and keeping extreme pornographic images.
In addition to his 26 months sentence, Davies will be placed in the sex offender’s register and given a ten-year restraining order on five of his victims and a ten-year sexual harm prevention order.
About the Victims
According to NCA’s press release, Davies, a software engineer by profession, spied on at least one teenage schoolgirl through hacking a webcam. He had targeted at least 25 to 30 people in the same manner and managed to access their files, photos, and webcams through RATs.
He used to film the victims during showering and undressing secretly. Furthermore, he is accused of stealing chat histories, intimate videos and images. According to Judge Julie Warburton, the victims feel violated as Davies’ wrongdoings had a devastating impact on them.
“This was a campaign of offending of a serious nature with devastating impact on 25 individuals who you exploited over a period of 10 years. The extent of the damage you have caused is immeasurable and constitutes a total violation of their privacy.”
Hacker’s Malicious Tactics
According to the agency, Davies was a customer of WeLeakInfo, a website that sold stolen and breached login credentials before it was seized by the FBI and the NCA. Furthermore, Davies used fake profiles on messaging apps to contact his targets and persuaded them to download malware by sending them URLs leading to the RAT.
SEE: 21 WeLeakInfo customers arrested for buying breached data
Moreover, he used crypters to disguise the malware from anti-virus tools. In some cases, he used Skype accounts to catfish his targets. He tricked them into performing sexual acts. He even befriended an eleven-year-old girl, and their relationship lasted for two years. He accessed her computer and switched the webcam on without her knowledge.
NCA’s operations manager Andrew Shorrock stated that Davies had “amassed what can only be described as a cyber criminal’s toolkit.”
“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,”
Shorrock.