I’ve had a few people contact me yesterday/today to describe having received an email with this or a similar title. The body of the email goes on to describe the email address of the user and in some cases a password that they use or have used.
It then requests an amount of money be paid into a specified Bitcoin account.
It threatens to release information and images taken with the recipients camera if the amount is not paid.
Typically the password supplied does not match the password for the recipients email account. While is it still possible that the miscreant has hacked your account, it does appear more likely that they are blasting out a massive mail merge with an old password database and they’re hoping to scare a few people into paying.
Still, best to be safe, so the following steps are recommended (in fact they’re recommended best practice anyway):
– make sure your computer as the latest security updates
– if you are running antivirus, make sure it has the latest signature updates and run a full scan
– if you have any website account logins that use the password in the email, change them. Make sure all of the passwords that you use are different for every site you access. The only easy way to do this is to use a password manager such as Lastpass.
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