I’ve been hacked

Heartfeltdawn

HAL9000 said:

Received an email today telling me my email had been hacked, and had control of my camera, microphone, etc, and that I’d visited adult sites etc and wanting money (bitcoin) sent or compromising emails would be sent to my contacts.

Yep, I've been watching you for ages. I didn't mind the porn you're into but owning three Metal Zones is utterly perverse. 

digitalscream

The dirty little secret is...anybody can send an email from any email address they like. There are some security efforts on a global scale to try to limit this, but ultimately - for an awful lot of addresses - there really is nothing to stop them.

That makes it easy to claim that an account is compromised, especially when it's possible to quote a password from years ago in one of those big breaches, but you'll never see any actual evidence beyond an email purporting to be from that address.

In other words, it's easily ignorable.

On the other hand, if you know what you're doing, it's not too difficult to trace the servers that sent these emails out in bulk. They're often not particularly well-protected, so - given that the one I got was from a server in Russia (this was about four years ago) - I monitored it for a few days, then used its open SMTP server (yes, really - no authentication!) to send a bunch of anti-Putin propaganda emails to a couple of hundred publicly-available Russian government department email addresses.

Server disappeared the next day.

DuploLicks

Treat it as a handy reminder to review the quality of the passwords you use and enable 2 Factor Authentication wherever possible 

boogieman

I found one in the junk folder recently claiming that MSN were awarding me 25% of their annual prize scheme, which equated to £950,000. Just send all my details etc etc  I thought this kind of unbelievable crap died out years ago, but there must be enough gullible idiots out there to still make it worthwhile. But then I cant believe the amount of “I deny Facebook the rights to my photos” posts that turn up either. 

WYNIR0

As everyone says, it's a scam. On an entirely separate note, I have some magic beans here you're just gonna love!

JerkMoans

dano said:

Just put some masking tape over the laptop camera before looking at porn and you'll always be free of blackmail from hackers.

And wear your leatherette gimp mask. For anonymity.

snowblind

These scams, where they tell you what your password is, are often based on the data breach at linkedin a few years back.
There have been a number of such breaches and the data gets sold on. You can ignore the messages obviously. There's usually some clues it's all bollox such as "we've been spying on you using your own camera" when you don't have a camera on the PC or the password they show you is an old one you haven't used for years. 

Delete the messages. Don't read them (they might have tracking pixels in them) and follow all the usual internet security good practices such as don't use obvious password, don't reuse passwords across multiple sites etc etc etc.

If things keep going as they are the internet will soon collapse under the weight of its own idiocy. When your phone automatically doctors your photos its a sign we've lost touch with reality.

Did you know they used to sell phones and cameras in India (not sure if they still do) which had a feature to automatically lighten skin tones because paler skin is regarded as a sign of higher status?

IMO it is a sign of one of the many flaws in humans. We work ever harder to "fix" security instead of addressing why we need it in the first place. The world around us is the product of 8 billion monkeys bashing away on typewriters and they aren't producing Shakespeare for the most part.

HAL9000

It’s an old email address, so not worried. It does turn out though what we hadn’t updated our email on a handful of things we’d signed up for in the past. Slowly getting that sorted and not opening any emails from our potential hacker (we’ve had another this morning).

Snags

It's a scam. You haven't been hacked. Your email address and a (hoepfully old) password will have been subject to a breach on some large site (Yahoo, BT, Lastpass, anywhere etc. etc.) and harvested onto a list that is then sold to scammers.

You get sent an email with one piece of valid info in it in order to put the wind up you.

It's total bollocks.

Just make sure if you're still using that email/password combo anywhere that you go and change the password, because that HAS been compromised. Probably about 10 years ago.

Kittyfrisk

Don't forget that you can send all such scam, spam, phishing etc. communications to  report@phishing.gov.uk
I was in a similar situation to yourself, getting loads of stuff following a data breach involving my email addresses & some details some years ago.
Reported them all & they eventually just dried up & stopped. Not really a magic bullet fix, but you are helping yourself & others by contributing to the bad guys database so action can be taken at a higher level to stop them.

Switch625

Are these emails still going around? Must be about 10 years ago that I had my first one. Ignore and delete. But if you're worried about whether your email account has been compromised, you can check here - https://haveibeenpwned.com/ 

darthed1981

Sporky said:

I got that and didn't pay. A few days later I started getting fan mail from people admiring my ability to wank over random YouTube suggestions. I've since started an Only Fans account and now make as much as 50p a year.

It was your kind offer of a 50p per year tier that made me sign up.

Sporky

Keep those YouTube suggestions coming! 

SteveRobinson

I've just received a similar email but the sender must be an idiot as he prefixed the subject line with ***SPAM***

***SPAM***  I RECORDED YOU!

Hello there!

 Unfortunately, there is some bad news for you.

 Some time ago your device was infected with my private trojan, R.A.T (Remote Administration Tool), if you want to find out more about it simply use Google.

 My trojan allows me to access your accounts, your camera and microphone.

guitartango

SteveRobinson said:

I've just received a similar email but the sender must be an idiot as he prefixed the subject line with ***SPAM***

***SPAM***  I RECORDED YOU!

Hello there!

 Unfortunately, there is some bad news for you.

 Some time ago your device was infected with my private trojan, R.A.T (Remote Administration Tool), if you want to find out more about it simply use Google.

 My trojan allows me to access your accounts, your camera and microphone.

No your incoming mail server may have done this (to alert you its spam)

rze99

Old trick. Unfortunately some people have fallen badly for this and taken their own lives believing they will be socially ruined.
One thing to say is that with the capabilities of GenAI, message based attacks are going to be much harder to deduce as we know that GenAI can spell do grammar and for the most part converse. Interesting to see these attempts coming through to me in Whatsapp and social media. And don't trust Linked in. MI5 are warning us the spies and crims are all over it with fake jobs and business approaches.  

TTony

That looks like a genuine one to me @SteveRobinson ;

You'd best pay up ....

idiotwindow

rze99 said:

Old trick. Unfortunately some people have fallen badly for this and taken their own lives believing they will be socially ruined.

Sounds a bit apocryphal. Are there any actual documented cases of this happening?

WezV

guitartango said:

SteveRobinson said:

I've just received a similar email but the sender must be an idiot as he prefixed the subject line with ***SPAM***

***SPAM***  I RECORDED YOU!

Hello there!

 Unfortunately, there is some bad news for you.

 Some time ago your device was infected with my private trojan, R.A.T (Remote Administration Tool), if you want to find out more about it simply use Google.

 My trojan allows me to access your accounts, your camera and microphone.

No your incoming mail server may have done this (to alert you its spam)

Whoosh......

Snags

@WezV ; If that's a serious whoosh, what GuitarTango means is that some mail servers (the system that email passes through on its way to you) will tag the subject line with a label, like "***SPAM***" if they think an incoming message is dubious, but isn't so dubious they can block it outright.