The FBI says hackers are targeting your most private photos, not just your passwords
The FBI has issued a warning that cybercriminals are breaking into social media and personal accounts to steal intimate photos and videos, not just passwords. The attacks target both adults and minors, with the stolen media intended for online posting, sale on criminal marketplaces, or continued exploitation. Criminals employ methods such as guessing passwords using previously exposed personal data and phishing through fake support messages.
- ▪The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center released an alert on August 10 highlighting attacks aimed at obtaining private photos and videos.
- ▪Victims of these attacks include both adults and minors, and the stolen media may be posted online, sold, or used for further exploitation.
- ▪Attackers use personal information from earlier breaches to guess passwords or PINs, as well as phishing pages and fake support messages to gain account access.
- ▪The compromised media is often sold on criminal marketplaces or used to extort victims after the initial breach.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Digital Trends |
| Canonical URL | https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/the-fbi-says-hackers-are-targeting-your-most-private-photos-not-just-your-passwords/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:41:22 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-12T11:46:34.014Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-12T11:46:34.014Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TARAqUkLc1n5 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The FBI is warning that some cybercriminals are breaking into social media and personal accounts with a specific goal. They want intimate photos and videos they can post online, sell through criminal marketplaces, or use to keep exploiting the victim after the account is compromised. In an August 10 alert, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said the attacks target both adults and minors. Criminals may use personal information exposed in earlier breaches to guess passwords or PINs. Others rely on phishing pages and fake support messages to trick people into surrendering account access.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Digital Trends.
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