Email SCAMs: Will they ever give up?

[Xairbusdriver]

These things obviously are passed around to the hacker new-comers batch every few months. They are seldom really new, sadly lacking in imagination.

TidBITS reports a recent surge in one that claims to display a password you've used and "requests" a bitcoin payment. Fortunately, these messages all have one common trait: very poor grammar, at least the English versions. This particular one gives away its veracity by claiming the recipient has visited 'questionable' sites.

You can read a sample and follow the discussions at “Hacked Account” Blackmail Spam on the Rise—Beware!.

Please take this as one more plea to use a good password manager and to consider changing passwords as often as practical. A good p/w manager is worth the price!

[Paddy]

Will they ever give up? Nope - as long as they get a sufficient number of bites to keep the lights on, they'll keep at it.

1Password is invaluable - I've had and used it for years and couldn't function without it, especially given that I manage almost 30 websites, all of which have a raft of passwords related to everything from the hosting and domain registration through to the domain email accounts for each and every one of them.

Just as the idiots trying to get into my websites keep on trying, the scammers and spammers will keep at it. One of my sites got hacked a while ago (host couldn't tell me how - it wasn't anything obvious, but they managed to shut me out of both WP and Cpanel by changing all the passwords, but that was as far as they got before discovery) and so I installed Wordfence* on the site. As well as helping to keep bad people/bots out, it tells me what they're up to. And it's constant - idiot bots that keep on trying stupid user names, other bots that managed to scrape the real user names (I forgot to remove "author" from the Tags pages, which I never use - but they could see 'em if they happened to load the correct URL) even though I've now deleted one user name entirely and will do the other shortly. And yet other bots trying to upload bad things or hunting for vulnerable plugins. If you didn't know it was going on with virtually every website under the sun, you'd be in quite the tizzy. I'd block the entire country of Vietnam, except that this means a ridiculously long list of IPs in the .htaccess file and having to update it every month, or using some sort of geo-blocking service, and the bots would just use some other proxy somewhere, anyway...in other words, a pointless exercise.

*The problem with installing Wordfence, which is a great Wordpress plugin, is that in order to know it's doing its job and what is going on, you need to enable notifications...and they need to be reasonably frequent, as being informed of something truly bad a week after it happened doesn't much help. So if you have 30 sites, it can get overwhelming very quickly, depending on the settings and the level of attacks the site is enduring. Plus it occasionally conflicts with other things...

[Xairbusdriver]

Double-post:
A couple of apps are mentioned in this Medium article that could be helpful with Text messages and iPhone SPAM/SCAM calls.

Also reinforcing tips we've offered at TS.

[Xairbusdriver]

Remembering our trip to Ireland several years ago, I was delighted to see that some of the local taxes were being returned, finally! I double-checked the link, so I'm expecting a refund before Christmas!!! Imagine, a "24/7" site on the web!

[Bruce_F]

I use Apple Mail sparingly. It is used for family and a few iPhone apps that I use. Gmail is great for filtering spam mail. I glance over the folder and hit delete and that takes care of it.

When I get the occasional SCAM or SPAM in my dot.mac account, I send the raw source to spamcop.net. If nothing else, the message gets seen by more eyes than just mine, and for the most part, they give up.

[Xairbusdriver]

I posted these mainly for the humor or humour (humuor?), depending on which side of the Pond you live. I actually enjoy watching any new atempts, if they show at least a bit of cleverness.

SpamSieve works great for me. I can’t remember ever seeing the same spammer twice. Of course, since the sender is usually spoofed, we can never be sure. That’s why most good filter methods use huge key word and phrase list, as well as addy blacklists. It’s great to have choices!