The thieves are starting to spread so called "vic-pics" - pictures stolen from a victim's pc.
So all scanned documents, private pictures and whatever else you store on your computer's hard drive is copied/gone and stored somewhere else.
When the crooks are done harvesting your personal material, they upload it to servers and post the respective URLs on their underground board for fun.
The sizes of the picture collections vary from a few items to even tens of thousands of private pictures. You can see every kind of pictures - from holiday pictures and private nudity to scanned contracts or even a child's school report - everything you have stored on your hard drive can be published.
Let's have a look at some publicly available "vic-pics"... We edited them for the sake of privacy!
The mere publication of private documents is wicked, but there are more risks coming with it: Photographed pictures contain automatically created Exif data.
This data sheet reveals a lot about the camera, the picture's creation date and the software used. On the one hand, the information about the used software can be a further gateway for exploitation and on the other hand, you can insert your own information like the creator's name AND many modern cameras often include GPS coordinates for every picture. You see what I am getting at?
This whole scenario shows, once again, how important it is to secure your computer, and therefore encrypt your personal data, with a reliable and up-to-date security solution!