Yet another phishing scam... huge data breach - why do we never really hear of these?

[thesausagesmademedoit]

So this morning I got a nice phishing email which as well as being poorly written, included my email and an old password, plus a claim “they” had a video of me watching porn that would be sent to my contacts if I didn’t pay them some bitcoins. Blah blah blah.

(I don’t know what bitcoins are!)

Anyways a quick google on this scam showed there was a large list of unencrypted passwords and emails published online last month, one of the biggest breechs ever, which got me thinking - genuine question, why is this information never really pushed out to email users etc?

Because t wash!5 necessarily I've breach which happened a month ago which put these passwords into the marketplace. They may have been gathered years ago, or from other (publicised) breaches. Such lists are sold and resold in the murkier parts of the Web, and it does appear that these scammers have bought a list in an attempt to add verisimilitude to this (fairly long-running) scam, as it has reappeared in the last month or so.

I had one of these to my work email! I forwarded to our I.T security dept as all our stuff is supposed to be secure.
I didn't read it all, just ran my eyes over it, but the email was actually pretty offensive and I can imagine some people being very upset by it (I was just angry)

@GlacindaTheTroll It came across in what I was reading that the availability of passwords not containing blanking characters like @ # * was from a new list generated in January.

On a personal note, I had to laugh, porn!? Bloody unlikely, I have a newborn and worked full time with over time until 24 hours before the emergency caesarean... I’ve never got time for porn!

I’ve had this email twice so far, they even quote and old password of mine (which is slightly worrying). They asked for £592 worth of Bitcoins within 72 hours otherwise they’d share my online activities to everyone in my contacts list.

They insinuated that I watch porn, and share videos of myself via email 😂😂 needless to say I just deleted their emails. Not sure my friends and family will be that bothered when they’re sent my online activity of watching cat videos and Friends bloopers 🤷🏼‍♀️

I got this email and it was written In a very sinister manner

My very elderly mother received one of these recently. She doesn't have a web cam and has never watched porn (or that's what she tells me anyway!) , so she knew it was a scam!

The list may have only been published in a January but was probably harvested a long time ago. You can enter your email address into haveibeenpwned.com and it will tell you when and via which site it has been compromised.

Ooh! Apparently I was pwned last year, using an email which ae dead some 4 yearsagoen Virgin sold us all to TalkTalk.