I got an email with one of my old passwords in the subject line, and again in the body. The enemy claimed not only to know my password, but to having used it to break into all my accounts, and my computer. The enemy claimed to have turned on my laptop camera and captured all kinds of embarrassing video of me. The enemy threatened to erase all my files and spread all the embarrassing information about me all over the web unless I sent a bitcoin payment.
Here is what I think really happened. Some organization I had an account with long ago got hacked, and my email and password with that organization were revealed. The enemy bought, or found, the data from that old breach, and sent out emails like the one I got. Maybe the enemy actually tried to get into accounts that are likely to belong to me, maybe not. If we pretend my email address was 123@hotmail.com and the password was passw0rd, the enemy might have tried to log into apple, ebay, amazon, gmail, yahoo, aol, etc. with that userid and password.
Why it doesn't affect me: I use a different password for every account, and keep track of them with a password safe. I looked up the compromised password using the search facility of the password safe, and found that I used to use it with a certain account, but I had changed it long ago. |
