Harringay online

Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Have now had two, separated by weeks, effectively demanding money by menace (want to be paid in bitcoin!!) because the scammer knows one of my passwords, which I've now changed. One also made explicit suggestions (untrue) about material I had on my PC, webcam etc. Also said don't try contacting the police as I've covered my tracks well, blah blah.

Just raising this here as I find this such a helpful forum. Of course I haven't responded but I haven't seen this approach to fraud discussed in papers, etc.

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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

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 

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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