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There’s a terrifying new e-mail scam that’s been making the rounds and it’s one that everyone should be on the lookout for. Before we get into the details of the scam, let’s talk about the taboo of watching adult videos real quick.
In 2016, over 4,599,000,000 hours of porn was watched on Pornhub. In 2017, that same website had 28.5 BILLION visits which translates to roughly 78.1 million per day or nearly 1,000 per second. Everyone watches it, even people we don’t want to imagine watching (i.e. Ted Cruz), but most people don’t talk about it. Now, for the details of this scam:
— You’ll receive an email from scammers/hackers and in the subject line will be one of your old passwords. They’ve grabbed this password from one of the countless huge data breaches over the past several years (LinkedIn, DropBox, Yahoo!, Tumblr, etc).
— The hacker sending you the email will tell you that they’ve used that password to hack into your computer where they’ve installed malware, malware that records video through your webcam without you being able to see that the webcam’s on.
— They will then tell you that they have videos of you watching pornography online and doing whatever it is that you do while watching pornography.
— Then they request a payment of somewhere between $1,200 or $1,600 in Bitcoin to be sent or they threaten to send the sensitive videos to everyone in your contacts list.
Business Insider has a copy of one of these emails and you can see an example here. They also share this quote from cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs who believes that this latest sextortion email scam is probably automated:
“It is likely that this improved sextortion attempt is at least semi-automated: My guess is that the perpetrator has created some kind of script that draws directly from the usernames and passwords from a given data breach at a popular Web site that happened more than a decade ago, and that every victim who had their password compromised as part of that breach is getting this same email at the address used to sign up at that hacked Web site.”
If you want to see if you’ve been hacked in the past few years you can always check out the website HaveIBeenPwned which will notify you of all the data breaches your email might’ve been involved in. And you can always take precautions by regularly changing your passwords and/or using 1Password to create robust and unique passwords for all of your accounts.