That's just click bait, BTW. My computer has not been hacked. But I have been receiving spam emails from my own email account that say my computer has been hacked. Because it is damn annoying, I decided to take this opportunity to talk about phishing emails. Here is a copy of the emails I have been receiving:
8Hello!
I'm a member of an international hacker group.
As you could probably have guessed, your account *email account here* was hacked, because I sent message you from your account.
Now I have access to all your accounts! For example, your password for *email account here*: ********
Within a period from July 30, 2018 to October 9, 2018, you were infected by the virus we've created, through an adult website you've visited. So far, we have access to your messages, social media accounts, and messengers. Moreover, we've gotten full damps of these data.
We are aware of your little and big secrets...yeah, you do have them. We saw and recorded your doings on porn websites. Your tastes are so weird, you know..
But the key thing is that sometimes we recorded you with your webcam, syncing the recordings with what you watched! I think you are not interested show this video to your friends, relatives, and your intimate one...
Transfer $800 to our Bitcoin wallet: 1GdegtNpYcvoCPsMmyiSkZARDdAmYuXGXU If you don't know about Bitcoin please input in Google "buy BTC". It's really easy.
I guarantee that after that, we'll erase all your "data" :)
A timer will start once you read this message. You have 48 hours to pay the above-mentioned amount. Your data will be erased once the money are transferred. If they are not, all your messages and videos recorded will be automatically sent to all your contacts found on your devices at the moment of infection.
You should always think about your security.
We hope this case will teach you to keep secrets.
Take care of yourself.
I removed the email address and password from the above email to prevent any further spam to pop up in my account, but the email account listed in this email is my own.
Now my first knee jerk reaction was that my computer did, in fact, have a virus. I do visit a lot of iffy sites for one of my jobs. The password listed is also a password I use and use frequently, but the reason I use that password a lot is because it's a throw-away password. I only use it for sites I really don't care about. It is certainly not the password I use for that particular email account. Actually, I have a different password for every account I own and I have my more frequently visited sites memorised and the less visited ones written down in my handy dandy notebook. This is a good practice to keep in case one of your passwords is compromised. That way all of your accounts aren't compromised, just the one. So it is quite possible I signed up on one of them "I don't care" websites and that is where these guys got the password. And just to be safe, I did run a boot time scan on my computer. I hadn't run one in a while so it wasn't a terrible idea.
Now back to these "helpful" fellows sending me an email from my account. It is actually quite easy to spoof an email. Just about anyone can do it. I assumed this was pretty common knowledge, but I guess not common enough. I did a little sleuthing to see how many people fell for this little scam. Do you want to take a wild guess?
