• 2 min read
Apple urged to do more against sextortion
Australia’s eSafety regulator says Apple, Meta and Google aren’t doing enough to stop sextortion, especially attacks targeting teens.
Image: 9to5Mac
Australia’s online safety regulator says Apple, Meta, and Google need to do more to combat sextortion, a form of sexual blackmail that disproportionately targets younger people, including children under 16.
A typical attack starts with someone pretending to be the victim’s age and building rapport through online flirting. The attacker then shares explicit images they claim are their own and pressures the victim to respond in kind. If the victim sends photos back, the attacker threatens to distribute them online or send them to family and friends unless money is paid.
According to TNW, Australia’s eSafety regulator says platforms are failing at a basic point of detection: language analysis. The report says sextortion offenders often rely on recognizable scripts, repeating the same coercive phrases across thousands of approaches, but platforms are not using technology that could identify them.
In Apple’s case, the regulator argues the company should try to detect these scripts in iMessage, similar to how it already detects nude images sent to children. The report also says Apple should make it easier for victims to report these attacks.
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The findings say reporting gaps remain across services including WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, and Google Messages. Some services lack a clear way to report sexual extortion or child abuse, while others do not offer a dedicated reporting category.
The regulator describes the problem as widespread: more than 10% of teenagers aged 16 to 18 said they had experienced sextortion, and more than half said it happened before they turned 16.
9to5Mac notes that Apple’s current protections already show it can do on-device analysis without breaking end-to-end encryption. The site also points to a developer report of a malicious message detection feature in iOS 26.6 beta five.
Security Editor
Sophia unpacks the invisible wars happening on our networks. Covering cybersecurity, privacy legislation, and cryptography, she exposes how our data is weaponized and defended. Before joining for(geeks), she spent years as a penetration tester. She's the reason the rest of the team uses physical security keys.
via 9to5Mac
