Shut Up Legs
Down Under Member
Or just do all the required PC cleaning manually (search for instructions on the web). Too many of these so-called PC cleaning apps install the very problems they claim to remove.
Blackmail by Email
- Thread starter Andy in Germany
- Start date
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Racing roadkill
Guru
I got one of these. I replied with an email with the worst scat I could find attatched and asked them if it was what they had as well.
D
Deleted member 26715
Guest
Put your email address into https://haveibeenpwned.com/ it may tell where the breach was
DaveReading
Don't suffer fools gladly (must try harder!)
- Location
- Reading, obvs
Drago
Legendary Member
- Location
- Suburban Poshshire
Although C Cleaner pro is the one police Tefalheads fear the most, as it seems it's the most efficient at removing nasties...or in their case evidence, and it's the one they all use themselves as a result.
So that's the one they tend to use themselves. I'm not aware of a better recommendation.
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Drago
Legendary Member
- Location
- Suburban Poshshire
Just about every word on Linkedin is a big fat fib anyway. It's full of people who haven't quite made it pretending they have.
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
There are loads of cracked/stolen password lists out there. Never use the same password for multiple sites, else you're trusting all of them not to be doing something stupid. Use a decent password generator, even for one-off sites, and a password manager (preferably one private to yourself, not a cloud one, but keep it backed up!) to keep track of them.
That suggests that:
- either your PC is compromised i.e they've installed a keylogger (most alarming)
- the site you used this password on stores passwords in plaintext/has really poor security standards (passwords should never be stored, not even encrypted)
- the site you used this password was compromised so much that they were able to capture your password when you logged in
- the password you were using was very common/trivially easy to reverse
Do you know which site it was the password for? Is it one of the main ones?
Best practice is a different, complex, random password for every site you use and a password manager to store them.
Or alternatively, if it's a one-off use, don't store it and instead use the password reset facility whenever you need to log in again.
Make sure the machine you're using is free of malware and then change all of your passwords. And then ignore the scamsters.
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
Just to highlight this: the security definition of "very common" includes all dictionary words in most languages including placenames and common letter-number substitutions like L1v3rp00l
But the current round of scam-spam seems to be using well-known lists from sites with poor security that have had saved passwords (yes, that's not a great idea) stolen from them.
Yeah, and with the advent of GPGPUs for brute forcing and the ability to store vast rainbow tables very cheaply, it's becoming a matter of when rather than if a hashed password gets reversed when a site's database gets compromised.
As end users we have no way of knowing which sites store passwords in the clear or use defeated hashing algorithms until it's too late
Drago
Legendary Member
- Location
- Suburban Poshshire
I got one of these emails. I told them my name was Accy, and I was going to report them the the warden at the flats.
LonesomeWanderer
Über Member
- Location
- Sherborne, Dorset
It’s great except for the odd minor issue....
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...ow-customers-use-piriform-avast-a7954896.html
