Some of use have been getting these every day, every hour or even weekly:
“Hi, I know one of your passwords is: ____________
Your computer was infected with my private malware…..” and it goes on to threaten that you have been recorded “SATISFYING YOURSELF”.
Of course my comic mind wants to know if they saw me drinking coffee or eating a protein bar…
The “sextortionists” are demanding anywhere from a few hundred dollars to THOUSANDS of dollars in BitCoin payments to a coded address in the email.
The criminals behind this round are using computers that were infected with a “spam-bot” to send these out to every hacked email and password combo they can get.
The infected computers were hit with a phishing email, the use clicked on the attachment and the computer is now under the control of the operators/perpetrators of this fraud.
The exact number of infected computers is difficult to determine, but there must be a sufficient amount to send this many sextortion emails to that many users this frequently.
In reality, the emails passwords being sent in the open are the ones that were scraped out of the recent hacks of major companies data breaches.
The site, “have I been pwned” can quickly tell you if your email address was involved and hacked from one of the major data breaches.
Sending me a 10 year old password to threaten me is ludicrous. However, some of my clients have had the same passwords for years and changing them can be rather tough to remember.
This also underlies and highlights my major push for my clients to have top-notch anti-virus protection, password managers that also connect to your smartphone, and to avoid any phishing emails.
I have been using LastPass for the past few years and have it installed on my browsers so that I can get to any of the highly secure passwords the program can generate on the fly.
LastPass is pretty easy to setup – if you need help and are still using one of the passwords from the breached data, please get me over to start securing your logins!
Backups.
I have gone on ad-nauseum about them to clients. My job is to ensure that if there is an attack of ransomware, a hardware failure or other issue, that I can restore as much as possible as fast as possible.
Between iDrive and the external local backups, data loss prevention is a high priority.
Every year my clients are now replacing their external backup drives with new ones archiving the old ones and this ensures that we have some method of retrieving data quickly and within financial reason.
The attempts to get into your data, accounts and wallet are real and as a consultant, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.
Scott (760) 550-9496 / (760) 969-0974 cell