An email arrives in your inbox, with one of your old passwords in the Subject line. Your curiosity is piqued, and you click into the message, only to discover that someone has allegedly hacked your webcam and recorded you engaged in some intimate acts, and they are now threatening to send this recording to everyone in your contact list. However, if you send the anonymous blackmailer a few hundred dollars in bitcoins they promise that no one will see the embarrassing footage.

This is a situation many people found themselves in over the last year, as we witnessed a revival and evolution in email extortion scams, which are exactly what they sound like: scam emails that attempt to extort cash from victims. These sorts of scams have been around for many years, but the scenario outlined above—often referred to as a "sextortion" scam—is one of the main types of extortion scams we have started seeing more frequently again since about mid-2018.

When we look at the number of these kinds of scams that have been blocked by Symantec since the start of this year, we can see the trend is going upwards, with a spike visible during a two-week period in February especially notable.