BlackmailSpam

[dewline]

Some discussion has been had on the subject of a particular form of it at the Spamfilter forum of my ISP, National Capital FreeNet, in recent days. Two articles came up in the course of the discussion so far. You may be interested.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/07/13/sextortion-scam-knows-your-password-but-dont-fall-for-it/
https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/New+Extortion+Tricks+Now+Including+Your+Password/23866/

Also, depending on which OS you use, this may or may not be of help:

https://objective-see.com/products/oversight.html

I do wonder if the scam is intended to fundraise for further "interventions" in democratic nations' elections in some way. But that is speculation on my part.

Comments

[thewayne]

I first received one of these back in August, then within the last month I received one that had my weakest password in the subject line of my email. I found it interesting that they got the password by a dictionary attack against the hashes, I didn't know that was the method.

I'm not concerned about my weakest password being revealed as it's only used against trivial accounts. I use much stronger passwords for anything using credit cards, and those are different for every different account.

I saw a sample of the sextortion message that wasn't implemented correctly that had [word1|word2|word3] throughout the email, it was very funny. Sadly, I can't find it right now.

Anyway, another good site is https://haveibeenpwned.com/. You can throw your email accounts against it, and it will look up your emails against databases that have been compromised and tell you if your email account has been compromised and what data elements were revealed.