Latest Spam Email Contains Your Real Password

A new spam email going around contains an eyebrow raising piece of information: one of your real passwords. Here's how the spammers likely got it and what you can do to protect yourself.See the email message here:https://ktla.com/2018/08/20/latest-scam-email-has-your-real-password-inside-heres-how-they-got-it/Follow Rich on Social Media:Facebook: http://facebook.com/RichOnTechTwitter: http://twitter.com/richdemuroInstagram: http://instagram.com/richontech Easy ways to listen on your phone or smart speaker:"Hey Google, Play the Rich on Tech Podcast""Hey Siri, Play the Rich on Tech Podcast""Alexa, Enable the Rich on Tech Flash Briefing"

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
The latest email scam raising eyebrows because it contains personal
information one of your real passwords. What's going on? I'm
Rich Demiro, this is Rich on Tech. Usually you can
spot a scam email pretty quickly. You see the poor grammar,
the spelling mistakes, and some of the things in the
email just don't add up. But spammers and scam artists,
they just keep upping their game, and their latest attempt

(00:26):
is pretty unique. I got a lot of emails about
this one, So here we go. The email starts out
strong with something like I won't beat around the bush,
I know that your password is, and then there it
is one of your passwords. The rest of the email
is a blackmail attempt. It says that it has some
compromising video of you taken from your computer's webcam during
a visit to an adult website. The video will be

(00:46):
released to friends and family if you don't pay up
a ransom, and the amount varies, but the email asks
for payment in bitcoin. Now this is where I think
the email sort of loses it. What average person getting
this email is going to be able to figure out
not only how to buy bitcoin, but also how to
send it to an anonymous spammer. Now, there are many
variations of the email going around. One has nineteen that's right,

(01:07):
nineteen steps on how to buy bitcoin and send it
to the proper address. That's a lot of work for
an anonymous email, but still, with one of the top
adult websites registering over sixty million visitors a day, the
email might certainly have some folks wondering if it could
be real. By the way, the scam isn't just being
delivered by email. People are also getting the same blackmail

(01:27):
message printed out and delivered to their home address through
the regular mail. So what's happening here? How did they
get your password? The passwords are likely pulled from recent
hacks of major websites, and there have been many high
profile hacks at really popular sites. So all the scammers
need to do is find one of these lists that
contain a combination of emails and passwords and then mail

(01:48):
merge them with the scam email and send them off.
Bottom line, you can ignore the email, but there are
some very important lessons to be learned here. First off,
don't reuse passwords. I know this is tempting since it's easy,
but these days it is not a good idea. Basically,
if one site is hacked, the bad guys can take
your password from that site and try it at various
other websites. The best thing to do is use a

(02:10):
password manager. These are little apps that you install on
your computer, phone, and tablet and they generate strong, random
passwords and remember them for you. Then when you go
to that site, you can copy and paste your use
your name and password into it from the password manager,
or the password manager might just fill in the password
for you, depending on what type of device you're using.
Keep in mind you'll also want to protect your log

(02:30):
into the password manager with what's called two factor authentication.
This means when you log in, you're going to get
a text to your cell phone with a special code
that you'll have to enter before your login can proceed.
The idea here is that a hacker might have access
to your password, but hopefully they don't also have access
to your phone, so they won't get that code, and
then they can't type it in and the log in

(02:51):
won't go through. And if it sounds like a lot
of work, well it sort of is. But that's the point.
Think about the information you're protecting these days, photos, documents,
banking and all of your private info. It's all online
and in the cloud. So two apps to look into,
last Pass, which is free, and dash Lane, which costs
sixty dollars a year. Another popular password manager is called

(03:14):
one password, that's the number one and password. There you
have it. The latest email scam, plus how to protect
yourself from similar attempts to steal your money or more,
because once you realize the patterns here, you can help
protect yourself. If you want to see the email, you
can go to my website it's richon tech dot tv,
or you can check the show notes for a link.
Thanks so much for listening, and please let your friends

(03:35):
know about the show by taking a screenshot of the
podcast and then sharing it to your Instagram stories. And
don't forget to tag me so I can share it
to my stories. All right, I'm Rich dmiro. I'll talk
to you real soon