Still sex scams in Italy. In the last days a new campaign with hot blackmail has started: if you don't pay, we'll put online your hard movies
The umpteenth online scam is going around in the last days also in Italy and, once again, it's a blackmail via e-mail. To try to steal our money, this time, is a fictitious "Anonymous Hacker" who writes from an e-mail address @hackeranonimo.info. There are at least two variants of this scam, but the mechanism is always the same.
The would-be scammer writes us that "the last time you visited a pornographic site with teenagers, you downloaded and installed the software I developed. My program turned on your camera and recorded the act of masturbation." Then the blackmail: "I give you the last 72 hours to make the payment before sending videos of your masturbation to all your friends." E, infine, la richiesta: 2.000 euro da pagare in Bitcoin. Ovviamente è tutto falso: nessun sito pornografico con adolescenti, nessun software che ha registrato nessun atto sessuale. Solo menzogne per tentare di truffare utenti del Web poco esperti di questi meccanismi di phishing ormai noti e stranoti. Purtroppo, però, qualcuno ci casca.
Fonte foto: redazione
Screenshoot dell’email minatoria
Truffa via e-mail, ma con la password
Esistono anche delle versioni più raffinate di questa e-mail, in cui viene citata anche la nostra password. Quella vera. In tal caso la cosa è ben diversa: vuol dire che l’hacker sta tentando la truffa con lo stesso stratagemma del video e del sito porno, ma che è riuscito effettivamente ad ottenere la nostra password da qualche leak del passato o bucando qualche sito al quale ci siamo registrati. In this case, in addition to ignoring the blackmail, we should proceed as soon as possible to change our passwords. Unfortunately, it is not possible to know which site the hacker has broken into, but it is still good to change at least the passwords of our main accounts: all e-mail addresses and all social profiles.
How to defend against e-mail scams
The defense mechanisms against e-mail scams all pass through caution. First, if someone claims to have compromising videos of us, we should all ask ourselves one question: if you have a video that sets me up, why won't you show it to me? Then we must be careful about the sites we register on, to avoid entrusting our credentials to untrustworthy domains that could be hacked by cyber criminals. If the phantom "Anonymous Hacker" has our e-mail address, and maybe even one of our passwords, somewhere he will have taken them. Finally, it is always worth the advice not to use the same password for all accounts but to use as many as possible, and that are strong: with upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters and at least 8-10 characters long. If we really don't have the memory and patience to do this we can use a good password manager.