January 4, 2019

Are you receiving Fake Blackmail and Spam Emails? Read this to stay safe!

a Few Simple Steps to Dealing with Spam

The internet’s hoaxers have ramped up sending millions of fake emails in recent weeks. The new tactics being used can be quite scary, going as far as claiming to have video footage of you from a webcam or even displaying a known password you have used. Having very public email addresses as we do, we have seen this first hand and thought it best to offer up some advice.

Firstly, if you receive an email like this, don’t panic. The main purpose of these emails is to cause fear and alarm. Seeing a password you once used in an email subject can certainly do that, but you must remember it isn’t a person that is sending you this email, there is no evil character sat at a computer trying to extort you. Instead it’s automated computer programme emailing millions of people from a database, technically this is no different to thousands of other spams you’ve received for years.

The difference with some of these emails are the personal which they can contain such as a user name or password. It is this which gives these scams a more shocking impact, how do they have these details?

Well, for that you have the big boys to thank. Barely a week goes by when you don’t hear a headline about a “data breach” at a large company. Recently there have been breaches in the news effecting popular social service Quora and hotel chain Mariott International, but much larger organisations such as LinkedIn and Facebook have had data on the users stolen over the years. It is through these breaches that small fragments of data about you have gotten in to the hands of the email scammers.

The data they have is normally useless. You will have been informed and probably forced previously to change your passwords in the event of a breach. There is also a useful tool online which allows you to see if your data has been exposed at haveibeenpwned.com

What should you do with one of these emails? Hit delete. Plus of course you should ensure to use some best practices when creating passwords:

Use a password manager such as LastPass or 1Password to generate and store different passwords for each site you use.

If a site offers “Two factor Authentication” use it. This creates a two stage log in process, if you don’t have both pieces of information you can’t get in. This often uses a mobile phone number to verify your identity too.