Nasty Type Of Phisihng Scam

[Palustris]

Had an Email threatening to send details of my supposed visits to Porn sites and images taken from our web camera showing me misbehaving whilst watching said porn. Pay up or else.
Sent it to Action Fraud. Changed all our Passwords. Ran every anti virus program we could find. Machine is supposedly clean.
Couple of small problems. a. Never been on a porn site. b. Don't have a Web cam. c. Wouldn't care if they did send details to any contact as that Email is only used by family who would not believe it anyway. They know me!
BUT. It certainly would put the wind up a lot of people. Very nasty.

[youngmafbog]

Highly unlikely they got your details from your machine.

List of email addresses are available on the Dark web for very little money. It's easy to send out thousands of mails (costs zilch) hoping you hit one as pointed out above.

Very difficult to stop these. I have my own server and set my own spam detection, the problem is determining what is true and what is false. You cant use the email address or domain as many seem to have multiple ones, cant use the subject either as i have found they vary that and often dont use anything easy to detect (usually not repeated either).

[barry1010]

They get passwords from data breaches, when big companies have been hacked. Everyone should check that their email addresses haven't been hacked every so often - I do it on the 1st of the month,

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

This is just some of the company databases that have been hacked https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/the-biggest-data-breaches-of-the-21st-century.html

[AuntPollyGrey]

I thought Companies were only allowed to store your email addresses. They do not store your passwords, but algorithms exist to try millions of possible passwords based on your email address. I guess sometimes they get lucky. My OH had a ridiculously easy password attached to his Amazon account, based on his initials and dob and he got hacked. Now all our passwords are random numbers and letters.

[barry1010]

APG, they must store passwords somewhere otherwise I can give any random letter or number when then ask for the 1st, 5th and 7th character of my password.
I use a password generator.

[AuntPollyGrey]

Typically, websites use hash functions in order to convert a user's inputted password to a safe format for storing. Hash functions are computer functions used to take a user's input and transform it into a format that's unreadable by potential hackers