Photos of porn actress used to extort 60 children on Instagram and Kik, federal authorities allege

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On Tuesday, Instagram announced that it would go Set teen accounts to private by defaultA recent sextortion case on the platform, one of many to plague Instagram in recent years, underscores why Meta felt the need to block accounts of younger users.

A Virginia man was charged in May of this year with carrying out a sextortion campaign via Instagram and Kik Messengerusing photos of a real porn actress to trick her as many as 60 victims Previously unpublished court documents show the perpetrators shared nude photos.

Gary Owens Jr. has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which allege he took online photos of the porn star, who now lives in Florida, and convinced victims he was a real young teenage woman named Jessica Lincon who wanted to have a sexual relationship with them. The government has not said why Owens did it, other than to enticing victims to produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM) for him.

After police searched Owens’ iPad, discovered google searches for the adult entertainment actress and evidence that he had visited pornographic websites to view images of the porn star, as well as hundreds of photos and videos of her undressing or performing sexual acts. Investigators also found more than 900 images of “men in some stage of undress or engaged in a sexual act,” according to a search warrant.

Forbes understands that the actress has not been contacted by law enforcement about the use of her photos. She did not respond to requests for comment and Forbes does not want to publish her name. Online discussions among porn enthusiasts show that It appears that the actress has deleted many of her videos and photos from popular adult content aggregators as well as a OnlyFans page.

The government gathered evidence showing that Owens conducted his sextortion campaign from 2021 through 2024. In its criminal complaint against the defendant, the government said it had identified 13 minors as definite victims, but said that “there were no at least 51 additional potential victims not yet fully identified.” In the search warrant, filed after the complaint, the FBI said it had identified more than 30 child victims and that the investigation was continuing. A trial is expected in early 2025.

Kik Messenger owner MediaLab.ai did not respond to a request for comment. Meta declined to comment on the matter, but pointed out Forbes to its new protection against sextortion. In the announcement Instagram Teen Accounts On Tuesday, the Meta site said teen users will not only be set to private, meaning they can only receive messages from people they follow or are already connected to, but also from people they follow who no longer use their account as private. Children under 16 need parental permission to use less protective settings.

Dawn Hawkins, CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, praised Meta for “a huge step forward to ensure minors are better protected from harm by making teen accounts private by default.”

“Instagram has been a leader in facilitating harm to minors – it is the main platform where perpetrators have threatened to distribute sextortion images and have actually distributed them,” Hawkins added. “We are grateful that Meta responded to our concerns to ensure that accounts of teens 16 and under are set to the highest security settings by default.”

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Why ex-Intel operatives think Hezbollah pagers started exploding amid suspicions of Israeli hack

A former IDF agent and a former NSA analyst narrate Forbes that it is unlikely that Israel carried out a completely remote hack to detonate Hezbollah beepersas they did en masse on Tuesday. Instead, they suspect the devices were intercepted, manipulated and forwarded to Hezbollah operatives before they were fired. It’s not a particularly difficult piece of sabotage to pull off, either; it requires some rudimentary hacking skills and explosive materials that could be purchased through Amazonsay the former analysts.

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My colleague Alex Knapp launches a new newsletter, The prototypefocused on science and emerging technology. Find out more details and register here.

The White House has announced that A number of AI companies pledge to combat the rise of AI-generated child abuse material (CSAM). Participants range from old school industry titans such as Microsoft And Adobewhile Anthropic And OpenAI have also made commitments in partnership with the Biden-Harris administration. Earlier this month, Forbes reported on allegations that a pedophile took photos of innocent children at Disney World and a high school and turned them into AI-generated CSAM images.

During a meeting with industry analysts last week, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison shared his vision of the future, in which AI surveillance tools will keep a constant eye on peoplee to ensure that “citizens will be on their best behavior,” Business Insider reports. The billionaire would of course become even richer if such a dystopian Big Brother world ever became a reality. Many of the technologies he described already exist, including AI-driven cameras via, for example, Safety of the herdthat continue to spread in the US

The UK National Crime Agency has a 17-year-old charged with attack on Transport for Londonthe government agency responsible for running the capital’s metro and buses. Thousands of passengers may have had their banking details stolen as a result of the breach.

Winner of the week

MasterCard has acquired cyber intelligence provider Recorded future for $2.65 billionThe cyber business digs up information on criminal and government hackerswith a claim to have 1,900 customers in 75 countries, including the governments of 45 countries. “By joining Mastercard, we see an opportunity to help more businesses and governments take the steps to realize their full potential – and to enable everyone to feel safer in their daily lives,” said Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future.

Loser of the week

Semafor spoke with two dozen former CrowdStrike employees after the catastrophic outage that grounded flights in July, the result of a faulty update from the cybersecurity giant. They said Executives were warned of “rushed deadlines, excessive workloads and increasing technical problems” in the year leading up to the outages. CrowdStrike disputed the reporting, blaming “disgruntled former employees” for the allegations, though Semafor said it had spoken to numerous former employees who had left of their own accord.

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