A paedophile who made use of internet chat rooms to hack into the PCs of schoolgirls and blackmail them into exposing explicit pictures of themselves was imprisoned for 10 years yesterday. Adrian Ringland, 36, from Ilkeston, Derbyshire, made use of a spyware Trojan horse to infest and have control over the girls’ computers. He made a clean breast of disguising as a teenage boy in online chat rooms with a view to infiltrating the malware on the user’s PCs. The victims assumed they were undoing a picture of their sham friend, however the attached file was infested and permitted Ringland to have control over their PCs.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos said,
What’s horrifying to realise is that it’s only a matter of time before this happens again - these children will not be the last to be abused via the internet using spyware.” “Similarly, it’s also conceivable that a hacker could blackmail one of their victims into a face-to-face meeting, using these computer techniques. Home computer users have got to learn from these incidents and take the necessary preventative steps to ensure that moving forward, we won’t have to read these horrific stories in the newspapers.
The court had the sense of hearing how the father-of-two made threats to run into the teenager’s PCs unless his desire was fulfilled by the teenage girls. He gave emphasis to his threats by turning their monitors on and off, taking their cursor around and opening and closing the disc drive. One victim explained it as they were watching a scene from the Matrix. Just the once, the girls had sent him one personal photograph, he started blackmailing them into emailing more and more by making threats to forward the picture to people in their email address list.
