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A 47 year old computer technician has been sentenced to four years in jail after being found guilty of using malware to gain control of webcams and to take pictures of the webcam's owners without their knowledge or consent.

The Cypriot man, who has not been named, used a Trojan program to control a 17 year old's webcam and take illicit pictures of her. He then attempted to blackmail the victim, saying he would make the pictures public unless she posed naked for him in front of her webcam. The victim, whose machine became infected after she opened an email attachment, responded to the blackmail demands by going to the local police.

The man was initially arrested in 2005, the same year in which two Spanish men were arrested in separate incidents for similar crimes. One of them, a computer science student, was ordered to pay 3,000 euros compensation to his victim, and a 1,000 euro fine.