Bogus "account hacked" message

[John Rollins]

I have received numerous such emails. They are all junk and not worth reading or being concerned about. They compile lists of email addresses, usually from old hacks, and then claim they have your password. Sometimes the password is included in the email - sometimes it is an out of date password that was valid when a site was hacked(so you can see there COULD be an issue with passwords that don’t get changed regularly, or that get re-used at multiple sites/servers) - often a site password while they claim it to be an email password. They claim to have hacked into your computer somehow using that information and are threatening to release “compromising information” that doesn’t actually exist.

That they found an address used only for a certain mailing list makes it more interesting. Doing a quick Google search it looks like the list archives can be searched through, and while the addresses appear to be slightly obfuscated using “at” instead of “@“, it’s feasible that the address was picked up by a random email address scraping of web data.


> On Jan 8, 2019, at 12:03, Peter Coghlan via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> About two hours ago, I received an email to the address I only use for
> cctech/cctalk.
> 
> It claimed my email account had been hacked and threatened all sorts of
> dire consequences if I didn't deposit $1000 in bitcoins in some place within
> 48 hours.
> 
> I am 100% certain that the claims in the message are completely bogus and
> none of the threats will be carried out.
> 
> It is likely that email addresses belonging to other list members are also
> to be found wherever my email address was scraped from so I just wanted to
> warn other list members about this scam in case they receive similar emails.
> 
> (I received the scam email directly, not via the cctech listserver).