Bitcoin sextortion malware also mines other cryptocurrencies

The scam was run by blackmailing people about videos of them being leaked, masturbating to porn.

Bitcoin scams are getting interesting by the day. Just earlier this month, scammers posed as the royal family and tried to get people to contribute to a "Brexit fund" to help the country deal with Brexit.

There's another scam, which is not even extortion, its sextortion. A string of sextortion emails has been sent to various people. Like most scams, the premise here is simple – scammers ask for extortion money in Bitcoin, or they will leak videos of the victim masturbating to kinky porn.

It seems targeted at the simple pleasures of the simple-minded – the contention being that they have used your smartphone camera to capture these videos.

The researchers call the malware used to execute the scam "save yourself," as most of the emails were received from bogus IDs such as "Saveyourself@856.com." The emails state that the malware has affected the recipient's system, which in reality isn't the case, according to cybersecurity team Reason.

But the hackers used not only Bitcoin but even the privacy-focused cryptocurrency, Montero. The firm pointed out that despite the claims, most computers receiving the email weren't affected. Also, the hackers hadn't taken into account whether the recipient may have multiple machines at disposal and read the email on any of them.

All that happened was that the recipient's email was exposed in a password dump. On the contrary, many websites claiming to remove the "Save Yourself" malware actually peddled malware that would infect a system instead of cleaning it.

"It is very possible that the malware author has gathered and combined several viruses and modified them to suit their own needs," Reason stated in an official statement.

This malware then affected close to 110,000 users. This particular malware uses an infected PC's CPU to mine Montero and replaces the user's Bitcoin address with its own.

But it has easy cures too, most antivirus softwares should be able to detect the malware and remove it. Also, most users who have marked such emails as scam haven't fallen for it.