Hackers are hunting for your private photos, FBI warns: 6 ways to avoid a sextortion nightmare
Business Home Business Social Media Hackers are hunting for your private photos, FBI warns: 6 ways to avoid a sextortion nightmare Hackers who steal compromising images of you from social media and personal accounts are selling them on the dark web. Written by Lance Whitney, ContributorContributor Aug. That's especially true now as the FBI is warning about hackers stealing and selling such images.In an advisory published on Monday, the FBI said that sexual exploitation hackers are targeting both adults and minors by illegally hacking into their social media and personal accounts to grab explicit images.
- ▪Business Home Business Social Media Hackers are hunting for your private photos, FBI warns: 6 ways to avoid a sextortion nightmare Hackers who steal compromising images of you from social media and personal accounts are selling them on the
- ▪Written by Lance Whitney, ContributorContributor Aug.
- ▪That's especially true now as the FBI is warning about hackers stealing and selling such images.In an advisory published on Monday, the FBI said that sexual exploitation hackers are targeting both adults and minors by illegally hacking into
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| Original publisher | ZDNet |
| Canonical URL | https://www.zdnet.com/article/hackers-private-photos-fbi-avoid-sextortion/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:37:36 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-12T15:41:32.509Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-12T15:41:32.509Z |
| 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 | 1BjY65F2KdXX · 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 |
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| 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
Business Home Business Social Media Hackers are hunting for your private photos, FBI warns: 6 ways to avoid a sextortion nightmare Hackers who steal compromising images of you from social media and personal accounts are selling them on the dark web. Here's how to protect yourself. Written by Lance Whitney, ContributorContributor Aug. 12, 2026 at 8:37 a.m. PT Aitor Diago/ Moment via Getty ImagesFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET's key takeawaysHackers are stealing and selling explicit photos from social media accounts.The hackers use social engineering and other tactics to gain access.Avoid posting any such images and watch out for potential hacking attempts.Storing sexually explicit photos of yourself on social media or personal accounts is never a great idea.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at ZDNet.
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