One sure sign of online entrepreneurial success in the Digital Age is when hackers start targeting your technologies, products and properties for exploitation. If you run an ecommerce site and you’re not a target of hacks and exploits, it probably means that you’re not doing very well on the branding front; if your name matters, you’re very likely on the cyber-crime hit list.

Ever since the iPhone first made its big splash back in 2007, mobile porn has been on the rise. It actually caught on in some markets before the smartphone age, but the larger, higher-quality displays that smartphones brought to the table led to an explosion in mobile porn surfing – and not just the kind that you need screen cleaner to deal with. Just as mobile has become the go-to environment for things like email and checking the weather forecast, mobile porn viewing has grown exponentially.

One sure sign of mobile porn’s success is the creation of ScarePackage, an exploit that renders phones inoperable, and uses fear of prosecution for illegal porn viewing to extort those whose phones become infected with the mobile malware.

Once it has seized control of your phone, the malware displays a message claiming that the user has accessed “prohibited content” and that the device has been “locked due to the violation of the federal laws of the United States of America.”

Congratulations Mobile Porn: You’re Somebody Now

Setting aside the obvious hassle, inconvenience and threat to consumers that this piece of malware represents, the silver lining here (for distributors of mobile porn, at least) is that hackers wouldn’t bother with this approach unless they had some reason to think it would work. In the hackers’ estimation, clearly so many people are watching mobile porn that a blanket threat aimed at such viewers would seem real to enough people to be an effective platform for extortion.

Sure, those who believe the message is legit might prove to be more cautious about watching mobile porn in the future, but the bottom line is that if there remained any question as to mobile porn’s viability as an entertainment form, those doubts have dissipated. Mobile porn has joined the likes of Victoria’s Secret, Target, Bank of America and myriad other institutions in achieving hack-worthiness!

Of course, that’s probably not much solace to the poor saps whose phones have been wrecked by ScarePackage, particularly those who really believe that the FBI goes around locking down people’s phones for looking at online porn. The FBI doesn’t do that, of course, and the allegedly violated “articles” of US criminal code referenced in the ScarePackage graphic are utter nonsense, but I think we can excuse consumers for their gullibility while in a state of pure panic – especially if they really have been viewing mobile porn recently. When you think the FBI has been watching you watch a pilfered copy of Butt Banged Boise Babes Vol. #42, I think we can all agree that’s not going to be a moment where lucidity and rationality govern one’s thoughts.

Yes, mobile porn, you’re Somebody now…. But as anybody who has seen The Jerk knows, that’s not always a good thing. And, as Jennifer Lawrence and other celebs that stuck their naked selfies on iCloud ripe for the 4Chan hacker responsible for what has become known as The Fappening, it can all just go downhill pretty quickly!

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Coleen Singer is a writer, photographer, film editor and all-around geeky gal at Sssh.com.

There she often waxes eloquent about sex, porn, sex toys, censorship, the literary and pandering evils of Fifty Shades of Grey and other topics not likely to be found on the Pulitzer Prize shortlist.

With over 16 years’ experience of writing about and for the adult entertainment industry under her belt, Coleen qualifies as something of a Web Porn Dinosaur; similar to a tyrannosaurus, only with far more attractive arms and a less pronounced overbite.

Coleen’s work has appeared under various pen names in adult industry trade journals and on several mainstream op-ed portals, including the The Washington Post, Huffington Post and Salon.

She is also the editor and curator of Eroticscribes.com

When she is not doing all of the above, Singer is an amateur stock-car racer and enjoys modifying vintage 1970s cars for the racetrack. Oh, she also likes porn.

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