I've been hacked and I'm been threatened

Lorian

These sextortion emails have been around for some time.

But what has changed is that one of the big botnets (Gamut maybe) has picked up one of the various password leak files and is including this in the message to help fool recipients.

I think they may be using the aggregated list of other breaches that was found on kayo.moe

According to the stats on one of the mail systems I run its being sending these in quantity since about the 1st October.

I suspect its lucrative for them so don't expect a let-up anytime soon.

As quoted many times, and worth repeating - These emails are NOT really personal to you. They are generated by a bot using data gained from someone else's website breach.

Actions to take if you get one:

1. Change your password on any site that uses it, if they have quoted a password you have used.

2. Turn on 2FA (two factor authentication) wherever you can. On Ebay, Amazon and Paypal for sure.

3. Depending on your mail system mark it as spam or Ignore/block any future emails sent with that Subject.

Many of the messages have one of the two following format of Subject line:

password (yourpassword) for you@youremail.co.uk is compromised
you@youremail is hacked

And for anyone new to this issue - please remember these emails are NOT a sign your actual PC has been compromised and they are sent by other people's compromised computers not by human hackers, and the email you got is the same sent to MILLIONS of people yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Clairescottshug95

Absolutely awful! I received one this morning, panicked and then thought about it rationally, and realised actually I haven’t got anything I’m ashamed of, and the only thing they have is my password which was more of the concern. I can imagine this being incredibly scary (as it was for me initially) and people handing over money which is just horrific. Absolutely dreadful!!

greedo420

beenthere_donethat wrote: »

How accurate is the link?

I put an old email address in and one of the sites that apparently caused a leak, was MySpace however, I've never been signed up to MySpace so how could my email address have been compromised through them?

The site says this about that


"When you search for an email address, you may see that address appear against breaches of sites you don't recall ever signing up to. There are many possible reasons for this including your data having been acquired by another service, the service rebranding itself as something else or someone else signing you up. For a more comprehensive overview, see Why am I in a data breach for a site I never signed up to?"

2013yearofthehouse

beenthere_donethat wrote: »

How accurate is the link?

I put an old email address in and one of the sites that apparently caused a leak, was MySpace however, I've never been signed up to MySpace so how could my email address have been compromised through them?

Have you tried going on MySpace and putting your email into the forgotten password link? You might find someone has used your email to sign up for an account themselves. This happened to me once - it was years ago, before many sites had that email confirmation step where you have to have access to the email account in order to finish setting up the account.

BizKiTRoAcH wrote: »

I've been using this site for years. It's completely legit. The information they get is from data breaches and leaks that are published in various places. The site can't verify that the data is completely accurate. It could be that 2 lists have gotten mixed up and your email was obtained from another list and published with the myspace leak. If you read the FAQ on the site they go into more detail about how they operate but its a really handy site. I've setup email alerts so if my email is exposed in a data breach, they email me as soon as they obtain the lists.

edit: OP... like a lot of people have said, ignore it. They got your information from a data breach and are trying to get money out of you thinking you'll panic and send it. There isn't anything they can do. They didn't 'hack your webcam' as they claim. Nothing to worry about

rhialwencomp wrote: »

Some sites used to use a feature where you'd upload your email address book and the site would look for friends using that. I think that myspace was one of them.

So it's possible that one of your contacts did this, and if data was kept then it could have been leaked.

greedo420 wrote: »

The site says this about that


"When you search for an email address, you may see that address appear against breaches of sites you don't recall ever signing up to. There are many possible reasons for this including your data having been acquired by another service, the service rebranding itself as something else or someone else signing you up. For a more comprehensive overview, see Why am I in a data breach for a site I never signed up to?"

I remember checking the site a couple years ago and finding that an email address I set up in 2014 is included in the MySpace hack that is supposedly taken from 2008. Since it’s not a particularly unique email address, I thought perhaps someone else had it before me (or theirs is similar and they mistyped it in the days before email confirmation was needed). It’s just an email address (that’s a variation on my name) that I used for (non-personal) Facebook and (non-personal) twitter notifications and I’ve never given it to anyone else, so I’m not really sure how it ended up on MySpace, unless someone else used it or there has been a mix up at some point.