Computer users around the world have started to receive e-mails from Scam to extort money. Depending on who sent the letter, its contents may change. However, colleagues from Business Insider was able to extract common features in the letters of swindlers and find a way to protect yourself from them.
As a rule, new e-mail scams contain the following information:
- Your password you ever used.
- The information that this password was used to crack the computer, installation it malware and tracking using a webcam.
- The threat to provide a record with the webcam and the history of visited adult sites to relatives, friends and other contacts in case of non-payment of funds in bitcoins totaling about 1200-1600 dollars.
Such a letter can really scare because one of your passwords is likely leaked at the time of the security issues some of the popular service. But the truth is that most of the scammers do not have access to your web camera, and contacts. Most likely, they have only one of your passwords and email address. Of course, if you don’t use the same password for different services, which do not strongly recommended.
Bleeping Computer have reported that some scammers have earned more than 50 thousand dollars in this way. These data were obtained on the basis of analysis of bitcoin wallets. But experts in the field of security believe that most likely, you have nothing to worry about. The fraudsters are not aimed at you, but mailing is automated. Here is what it says about the situation Brian Krebs, a leading journalist in the field of security:
I assume the scammer has created some script that uses user names and passwords leaked from the popular web site a few years ago, and that each victim received a letter that used the same email address to log on to a compromised web site.
Indeed it seems that the crooks are using a very old password. Maybe the victims for several years do not use them. To not be afraid of scams, you need to use a different long and secure passwords. To simplify the work with them there are specific password managers.
Users of computers began to threaten the publication of personal videos and browser history
Ernest Vasilevskiy