Source: here
Cybersecurity is a very important subject nowadays, and you can take it more or less serious, but keep in mind, the less attention you pay to it, the more you're exposing yourself.
This is not at all my usual kind of content, but, shit happens. More exactly, a moron decided to break my university account and then using the email started to send messages to the same account with my password for that account in the description. I blacked out the address and password, but they were correct.
I've discovered this randomly, mostly because nothing important is ever send to that email, and I very rarely even check this inbox, maybe once or twice a year. Basically, I only use it to upload a homework or enter a course, the inbox is useless.
And that time of year came last night, only because I had to actually check for a mail. At first, this got me by surprise, and I panicked a little bit, thinking about how this might get access to my computer, especially from that address. I'm kinda paranoid on situations like this one, but I was never going to give up to blackmail, especially to free advertisement, lol.
A piece of advice
- Don't ignore your security on the internet, because data is very valuable nowadays, and idiots like the guy that break into my account will use them against you without a second thought.
- Separate your passwords, even if you don't have a unique one for every account, at least have one for each important account
- Use two-factor authentication whenever you can, it might save you
- Always have a back-up account set-up for the mail, because you can lose every account created with that mail, even if you have different passwords for them
- Back-up your data
This wasn't so bad after all, but it made me really level up on security. I changed all my passwords to something more secure to a point when even social engineering will not work on them, and the account that was hacked will not see the light outside a virtual box for the rest of its existence.
As for the guy that tried this scam, I'm sorry for the plants that produce oxygen for you.
Cool guys on Hive: @vladalexan, @enjar
Cheers,
@cm0isa
Before I didn't give much importance to this, I even used a single password for almost 6 accounts. However there was an occasion in which a game in which I have invested a lot of time and some money suffered a massive hacking, luckily it did not affect me but the scare I had made me realize the importance of this, so now I have a different password for each account, no exceptions, in addition to having them physically written down in a notebook.
I am glad that in your case it was nothing serious either.
I was kinda lucky because I knew how to react to it, unfortunately, I looked up the bitcoin address. There were reports about blackmail and scamming fraud, but that account had $1512 in it from different transferred from multiple accounts.
I made this article hoping that if someone will ever be in my position, it will react the same, not giving up to the scammers.
I looked up the activity earlier, after I secured everything, and looks like the moron came back to check the account, and when he realized I changed the password, he started running his brute force program again, hitting the account every few seconds on a different server most probably, with a new IP address every time.
I'm actually glad he did that. It proved to me that the new password is actually safer, and confirmed what I was 95% sure about, and that is he didn't actually have any remote access to my PC.