Angela Mc Kenna, senior investigating officer for the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit, said: “Users of these tools are continuing to find that despite having no physical contact or interaction with their victims, they can still be identified, tracked down and brought to justice by the NCA and its partners.”To help reduce the risk to individuals and businesses from malicious RAT use, the NCA continues to urge everybody to avoid clicking on unknown links, or files sent from unidentified or suspicious sources”.

For further information please visit the NCA website.

One day in Melbourne, when the sun was out and the birds were singing, Matt opened an email and was greeted with a video of a man wanking.

The man was him."There I was in all my glory," he told triple j's Veronica & Lewis. A 'ransomware' program had infected his computer allowing the hackers to film him through the webcam. Now they wanted money."There was an email saying they were going to release footage to all my Facebook friends and people I worked with if I don't pay them money.""Initially I laughed."He wrote back. Matt may have been feeling very much alone, but in fact he was part of an emerging trend of ransomware attacks in Australia.

The software can turn victims’ webcams on and off, access banking or other personal information, download new and potentially illegal content, and instruct the victim’s computer to help commit acts of criminality such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDo S) attacks.

When the National Crime Agency (NCA) examined Rigo’s computer equipment they found a series of images that involved people engaged in sexual acts over Skype or in front of their computers.

According to one, there were more than 200,000 ransomware attacks in Australia in April-May alone this year.

The statistics from Australia's very own government cybercrime initiative are a lot lower.

In September 2015, Rigo attended Leeds Magistrates Court and was found guilty of voyeurism offences.

He was sentenced to a 40 week suspended sentence, seven years on the sex offenders register, 200 hours of unpaid work and the forfeiture of all his computer equipment.

But they could recognise their living room and from the angle, the video was taken they worked out that it must have been filmed from the webcam that was attached to their smart TV.

There was no communication from anyone to the couple – no blackmail threat or revenge-type message.