Hackers Rig Ratings of Pro-Putin Videos and Spy on Iranian Expat Living in the US

In case you missed our coverage this week in ThreatWatch, Nextgov’s regularly updated index of cyber breaches:

Canadian Woman Allegedly Harassed Kids through Hacked Webcams, Showed Victims ‘Extreme Porn’

Valérie Gignac, of Quebec, apparently took control of people's computers remotely, to peer at and bully them. The 27-year-old is believed to have created a botnet -- or infected a series of computers with malware that turns them into zombie machines, commanding them to perform tasks without the owner's knowledge. 

Hackers Launch Campaign of Intimidation against Iranian Expat Writer

The opinionated Iranian author Roya Hakakian, who has spent 30 years living in the United States, was subjected to cyber espionage starting last February. “The common bond among all Hakakian’s outspoken work for the past decade is that she wrote it in English,” the Daily Beast reports. Once Hakakian’s work was published in Farsi, “she seems to have tripped a wire that alerted the Iranian cyber hounds.”

Web Scrape of Buried Twitter Financials Technically Amounts to a Hack

Financial-intelligence firm Selerity took credit for publishing Twitter's earnings announcement before NASDAQ's closing bell. Web-crawling bots run by Selerity uncovered the financial report -- an abysmal $162 million first-quarter loss -- buried deep in Twitter's public investor relations page.

Hackers Manipulated Ratings of Pro-Russian Videos

Hacktivists and/or cybercrooks compromised the computers of victims to invisibly load propaganda videos and ads, upping click-views, and thus the popularity, of party line promos and commercial products.