U.K. Hacker Jailed for Spying on Children and Downloading Indecent Images

A man from the U.K. city of Nottingham has been sentenced to
more than two years in prison for illegally breaking into the
phones and computers of a number of victims, including women and
children, to spy on them and amass a collection of indecent
images.

Robert Davies, 32, is said to have purchased an arsenal of cyber
crime tools in 2019, including crypters and remote administration
tools (RATs), which can be used as a backdoor to steal personal
information and conduct surveillance through microphones and
cameras, catching the attention of the U.K. National Crime Agency
(NCA).

The cyber voyeur’s modus operandi involved catfishing potential
targets by using fake profiles on different messaging apps such as
Skype, leveraging the online encounters to send rogue links hosting
the malware through the chats.

“Davies was infecting his victims’ phones or computers with
malicious software by disguising it with the crypters so their
antivirus protection would not detect it,” the NCA said^[1]
in a statement. “He then used the RATs to gain remote access to
their devices and steal any sexual images (mainly of females) they
had stored on there.”

At least in one instance, Davies spied on a teenage girl via a
hacked webcam. Officials said a total of 27 compromising images and
videos of children were found on his computer, with over 30 victims
identified over the course of the investigation.

Furthermore, Davies has been determined as a customer of a
now-defunct marketplace called WeLeakInfo^[2], which pawned access to
data gathered from other websites until its disruption in January
2020. Later that year, the NCA arrested 21 individuals across the
country for using the stolen personal credentials to commit further
cyber and fraud offences.

Davies, who was arrested thrice between November 2019 and August
2021, now faces a jailterm of 26 months on charges of computer
misuse, voyeurism, owning indecent images of children (IIOC), and
for making IIOC and possessing extreme pornographic images. He has
also been placed on the sex offenders’ register and given a 10-year
restraining order on five of the victims along with a 10-year
sexual harm prevention order.

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