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Oh joy, a more sophisticated spam/extortion racket

My spam filters caught an interesting message recently, an email from myself (from field forged) claiming that my account was hacked and correctly naming my email address (account name) and a legit past password… hmm, I am paying more attention now…

The would be extortionist is asking for bitcoin worth about $837 presently, and threatens to expose my alleged naughty site visits to my entire contact list. At this point I am chuckling, as I don’t care (threats of embarrassing websites are not embarrassing to me) and I realize it s all a bluff; the password the extortionist claims to have used to access my computer was never the password to my computer, though it was my old Yahoo! account password until all those millions of Yahoo! accounts were exposed in about October of 2014…

Then it occurred to me; if a user was not as scrupulous about unique passwords for each account, they might be exploitable through this method… Heads up, if your account at Yahoo!, Target, Home Depot, Equifax, Experion, PlayStation Network or any other site is exposed, it is NOT proof that crackers actually have access to anything other than that one account… ask for proof.

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