Very unpleasant spam emails

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Permalink Reply by Mike on December 7, 2018 at 20:44

I too have had an email this week coming from my own email address (purportedly) demanding a BIt Coin payment of $496 to prevent the release of pornographic images to all my email contacts. The knowledge of a password I have previously used was meant to scare me but in my case I had already changed it several years ago ( 4 or 5 years at least) which means this is quite old data being passed on to scammers.

The words used in this particular email threat  indicate someone with quite a shallow knowledge of IT and also a very basic grip on grammar.( The use of words like malware and Trojan in this context are unlikely to be used by an actual hacker)

This is a amateur attempt at extortion but it does worryingly indicate that your details are now being traded online as a potential victim so you should start taking precautions.

Create a new Gmail or MS Outlook email address and move any potentially vulnerable logins to this new account 

Check if your email address has been confirmed to be compromised on https://haveibeenpwned.com/. It is entirely up to you if trust an altruistic "white hat " site but it is verified https by thwaites ( pretty much the same rules as online banking) and does show what password combinations are common knowledge.

Change your password to a complex sentence not just a word ..use at least 12 characters with Upper case and symbols as these passwords are too time consuming for a Brute Force algorithm to crack.(They can be cracked as any password can be if there is a reason but anything that takes more than 12 hours to process is generally discarded by scammers)

I changed my Apple and Amazon account  logins and passwords just to be on the safe side and have seen no evidence of these being targeted in the past few weeks.

Hey I know long passwords are a pain to type in but try to use something longer than 12 characters.

Mike

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Permalink Reply by tigha on December 8, 2018 at 19:20

I use gmail as do most people I know. It manages to filter out about 99% of these spam. And saves a lot of stress 

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Permalink Reply by 0l7ft44vlytse on December 13, 2018 at 12:36

Everyone should use 2 factor authentication on their email, the minor inconvenience of typing in a code from your phone every month or so far outweighs the risk of someone using whatever is in your email.

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