email claiming hacked camera Email claiming hacked camera. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 664a6f2feb2e0d36 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Scammers Are Pretending to Have Webcam Footage of Victims Watching Porn to Make Them Pay Up. A widespread sextortion campaign is being orchestrated by scammers who falsely claim to have webcam recordings of victims watching pornography in order to demand bitcoin payment. The culprits—who threaten to release the non-existent footage to the victims' close contacts if money is not received—have already made around $125,000 from the scheme to date, according to security researcher SecGuru, who is monitoring the bitcoin addresses used by the scammers. "Victims continue to pay, do not do this, it is a scam!" SecGuru tweeted on Monday. Experts are warning anyone who receives such threats to ignore them. SecGuru told Newsweek that 77 payments had been confirmed so far but it was estimated that there could be "hundreds of thousands" of email recipients. The latest emails are being sent from genuine Outlook.com email accounts and are "almost unblockable," SecGuru explained. The blackmail email contains a reference to the victim's real password in the subject line, which analysts suggest were stolen from a previous data breach. Cyber experts who have searched HaveIBeenPwned—a website that checks for hijacked credentials—found targeted addresses were all previously compromised. Now, a botnet is likely spewing out spam emails in bulk. "I find it very shocking that this form of scam is effective," SecGuru told Newsweek. "I feel sorry for the victims." In some cases, the sextortion culprits are demanding thousands of dollars. Based on screenshots posted on social media, the emails appear to follow the same template. They read: "I'm aware, [the user's stolen information] is your password. You don't know me and you're probably thinking why you are getting this mail, right? "Well, I actually placed a malware on the adult video clips (porno) web site and guess what, you visited this website to experience fun (you know what I mean). just after that, my software program gathered every one of your contacts from your Messenger, Facebook, and email." The emails demand payment within one day in cryptocurrency, warning the victim: "If I do not receive the Bitcoins, I will definately [ sic ] send out your video recording to all of your contacts including close relatives, co-workers, and many others. "Nevertheless, if I receive the payment, I'll destroy the video immidiately [sic]," it adds. "If you need evidence, reply with 'Yes!' and I will send your video to your 10 friends. It is a non-negotiable offer, therefore do not waste my time and yours by responding to this message." SecGuru advised that anyone who is concerned about the blackmail threats should change their passwords and enable two-factor authentication on all accounts that offer the feature. Authorities warn legitimate sextortion cases are currently on the rise across email and social networks. Cases can be reported to the FBI's internet crime complaint center (IC3). The online service HaveIBeenPwned can be freely used to check if email accounts have been stolen by hackers. I got a phishing email that tried to blackmail me – what should I do? I got this email today. It says “I hacked your device, because I sent you this message from your account.” It goes on to claim that it has filmed me watching pornography, and demands $698 in bitcoin. Phishing? Pwned? What to do? Pauline. This is generally known either as “webcam blackmail” or “sextortion scam” and the email should have been diverted to your spam folder. Millions – perhaps billions – of similar emails have been sent over the years, but there seems to have been a flood of them over the past few months. Very few people ever make the requested payment. However, since the cost of sending millions of spam emails is basically zero, even a few payments are easy profits. While it’s generally safe to ignore spam emails like this, some people will want reassurance. You can almost always get this by searching the web for one or two sentences from the email. In this case, phrases appear on two threads in the r/Scams conference on Reddit: The Blackmail Email Scam and The Blackmail Email Scam (part 2). Publishing all the variants of these scam emails makes them easier to find. What’s on the hook? Random spam emails probably don’t have much success, so the would-be blackmailers have been trying to personalise their attacks in various ways. The most common ones are email spoofing, including a password, and including all or part of a phone number. Most email services have no way of authenticating the From: and Reply to: fields in email messages, so spammers can fill these fields with anything they like. Your attacker simply made the From: address the same as the To: address, so it looked as though you had sent the email yourself. You hadn’t. In 2012, a working group introduced a new system called DMARC (domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance) to alleviate the problem. It helps but it’s still not used widely enough. Dmarcian has a website where you can check if a domain is compliant. (Both google.com and outlook.com have valid records.) Other versions of this phishing attack include one of the recipients’ passwords and/or part of a phone number. These have usually been obtained from one of the security breaches that have exposed details of billions of users. In 2017, Yahoo admitted that its data breaches compromised 3 billion accounts. Other major breaches involved Marriott International (500 million customers), LinkedIn (164 million), Adobe (153 million), eBay (145 million), Sony’s PlayStation Network (77 million), Uber (57 million) and Ashley Madison (31 million). Password checking. There’s a good chance that one of your passwords was exposed in one or more of these breaches. You can check by typing your email addresses into the website, Have I Been Pwned? At the time of writing, this has 5.7 million pwned accounts from 339 pwned websites. There’s also a newer page for pwned passwords, as explained here. If your email address comes up in HIBP? then you must change the password that you used for all the sites that suffered data breaches. If you used the same password for any other sites – that’s a bad idea, obviously – you should also change the password on those. If the Pwned Password page reveals that one of your passwords has been exposed, you should change that as well: you may not have been pwned, but your password is not unique. Some are quite common. For example, the password “12345” has been exposed 2.3m times, “secret” 221,972 times, “god” 32,804 times and “arcticmonkeys” 649 times. Dashlane has a nice website that will tell you how long it would take to crack your password. However, even strong passwords are no use if they have already appeared in breaches. The xkcd cartoon password “correct horse battery staple” would theoretically take 15 octillion years to crack, but it has already been pwned twice in that form … and 111 times without the spaces. Scam reporting. In the UK, you can use Action Fraud’s website to report a phishing attempt if “you have NOT lost any money or exposed your personal details. If you have lost money, you must report it as a crime,” the site says. Reporting phishing attempts is simple but optional: some people get several phishing emails per day, and they’re unlikely to report most of them. I don’t have any numbers, but I expect most people just delete and forget about them. Reporting a crime requires more effort, and if you are serious, you should create an account to do it. You can file a report as a “guest” but creating an account provides more options. You can, for example, save and resume reports, update them later, call Action Fraud to discuss your case, and get email progress reports. You can also report crimes by calling 0300 123 2040 on weekdays between 8am and 8pm. Businesses, charities and other organisations are urged to call this number during live cyber-attacks at any time. Action Fraud – which used to be the National Fraud Reporting Centre – is operated by the City of London police and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB), which is overseen by the City of London police. They don’t investigate cases, but check them for “solvability factors” such as bank account details, phone numbers, postal addresses and so on. If there are any, they pass them on to a “local police force or other appropriate law enforcement agency”. By which time, any money transferred is likely to have disappeared … Safety first. The best way to deal with phishing and other spam emails is to delete them on sight. Don’t open them, don’t reply to them, don’t open any documents that may be attached to them, don’t click any links in them, don’t enter any information into websites fetched by those links, and definitely don’t send them any money. Many of these emails will include a transparent, single-pixel image, known as a beacon. When you open the email, it fetches the tiny image.gif file from a remote server, so the spammers know they’ve hit a live, working email address. (Note: Gmail and some other services pre-fetch images to avoid this problem.) Also bear in mind that spam and phishing emails may include attempts to infect your computer with malware. This is why you should keep your anti-virus software and operating system up to date. It can be annoying, but thousands of PCs were infected by malware such as Stuxnet and WannaCry months or sometimes years after the vulnerabilities they exploited had been patched. New scam tries to blackmail with bogus porn threats. A new email scam is making the rounds with bogus claims about pornography use to extort money. In this scam, scammers email you claiming that they’ve stolen your password and have created videos of you using adult web sites. On top of that, they claim to have all of your contacts. The good news it’s a scam. But it can be terrifying for some. One woman, who was “in tears,” called it “very frightening,” according to a report in Canada’s CBC. A typical email reads something like this: “I know your password” and “I have installed malware on an adult video site.” Then the claim gets more elaborate. “While you were watching video clips, your web browser began operating as a RDP (Remote Desktop) that has a key logger,” is a typical threat. This, the scammers claim, gives them access to your display screen and webcam. Then they drop the hammer, usually something to the effect: “If you ignore this, I will send your video to all of your contacts.” Of course, they give you a way out: pay them money – usually $1,000 or more – and they promise to delete the video. That’s the gist of the many forms of this email that have appeared in forums, blogs and on Twitter. For example, one threatening email – similar to the wording above – was posted by ThreeShield Information Security, a Canadian firm. Linked to old breached passwords. What makes it scarier is, the scammers do you have your password in some cases, though it can be an old one. “If you received an email like this one, we have good news and bad news for you: You weren't caught looking at porn; however, your LinkedIn password was exposed 6 years ago,” according to a blog post by ThreeShield. The security firm concluded that the scammer is harvesting email addresses and passwords from a 2012 LinkedIn hack that breached over 100 million accounts. Threeshield added that they have tracked 9 bitcoin addresses associated with the scam, in which victims have paid a total of 4.61461859 Bitcoins or approximately $38,000. FBI issues warning of adultery blackmail scam. This week, the FBI in Jacksonville, Florida warned about a similar blackmail scam that threatens to reveal information about acts of adultery. “The scammer threatens to reveal the information to the recipient’s spouse, family and friends, and demands payment in exchange for secrecy. In an effort to avoid detection, the scammer often insists on being paid in bitcoin, a virtual currency that is legitimate but difficult to track,” the FBI said in a statement this week. Don't Fall for This Scam Claiming You Were Recorded Watching Porn. Some reports have been shared by Bleeping Computer , Krebs on Security , and TechCrunch of a new scam in which the perpetrators send people emails claiming they know the recipient’s password and have used that password to install malware on their computer and captured a video of them watching porn and masturbating. One such email, which programmer Can Duruk shared on Twitter, reads: I’m aware that XXXXXXX is your password. You don’t know me and you’re thinking why you received this e mail, right? Well, I actually placed a malware on the porn website and guess what, you visited this web site to have fun (you know what I mean). While you were watching the video, your web browser acted as a RDP (Remote Desktop) and a keylogger which provided me access to your display screen and webcam. Right after that, my software gathered all your contacts from your Messenger, Facebook account, and email account. What exactly did I do? I made a split- screen video. First part recorded the video you were viewing (you’ve got a fine taste haha), and next part recorded your webcam (Yep! It’s you doing nasty things!). What should you do? Well, I believe, $1400 is a fair price for our little secret. You’ll make the payment via Bitcoin to the below address (if you don’t know this, search “how to buy bitcoin” in Google) . BTC Address: 1Dvd7Wb72JBTbAcfTrxSJCZZuf4tsT8V72 (It is cAsE sensitive, so copy and paste it) Important: You have 24 hours in order to make the payment. (I have an unique pixel within this email message, and right now I know that you have read this email). If I don’t get the payment, I will send your video to all of your contacts including relatives, coworkers, and so forth. Nonetheless, if I do get paid, I will erase the video immidiately. If you want evidence, reply with “Yes!” and I will send your video recording to your 5 friends. This is a non-negotiable offer, so don’t waste my time and yours by replying to this email. Bleeping Computer shared a screen grab of virtually the same email sent to someone else, and shared a tweet by security researcher SecGuru, showing a version of the email sent to them .