Password Email Scams

A recent (in the last 6 months or so) scam that has been showing up with a lot more frequency is an email scam about some “hacker” who has gotten your “password.”

If you’ve gotten this, you probably freaked out at first. So first things first, there is a 99.99999% chance this is a total scam. Now, let’s talk about how we know it’s a scam, and what you can do to protect yourself.

What the email looks like is below, and you can see it seems pretty scary at first glance.

The Scam Email

I’ve blurred it out, but they clearly have my email address, and they have my password…well, an old password that I don’t use anymore, and didn’t even when I got it.

Now, these emails will take on a couple of variations, but generally they follow the following outline.

1. They own an adult website, or was hired by one of your competitors to spy on you. They infected your machine and stole your password, which they show you to get you scared.
2. They have compromising photos of you, and they can keep track of your password, so changing it won’t do any good.
3. You need to send them bitcoin to keep your identity/embarrassment/private information safe.
4. You have X number of days, or they’ll forward all of the embarrassing stuff to your friends, family, etc.
5. Don’t bother contacting them, they won’t negotiate, or they “sent it from your email to prove my power” which means it won’t get back to them.

How I knew it was fake

I knew right away it was fake for several reasons.

First, I don’t visit shady sites. And while viruses can be found on some adult oriented sites, if you avoid those, or stick to popular ones run by legitimate businesses, your risk for viruses goes way down.

Second, when I got this email, I hadn’t had my web camera connected to my computer for months…and months…and months. In fact, due to security reasons, I generally don’t have my webcam attached unless I’m actively using it.

The final reason, is below…

The Reality

Shortly before I got my first email like this, and by now I’ve gotten dozens, I had read an article. Unfortunately a couple of well known websites had gotten hacked and passwords, with attached email addresses, were in the wild. There is actually an underground black market for this information.

I won’t mention their names, as there were several, but it now people had a large number of email addresses and passwords. And since most people use the same password over and over, they assume that they got hacked…

I, on the other hand, just deleted the totally bogus email. And you know what happened. Absolutely nothing.

How to Protect Yourself

Now, if you are using that password, you might want to go and change it. This should be step one.

Step two, you should start a process of changing your passwords periodically, in case they some future site gets hacked and your email and password gets out there.

Step three, make sure your passwords are strong. Need to test your password, click here. Long passwords are best, although many sites require random characters, numbers etc. If you need a password generator, we have one of those too.