Possible Site Hack

I have just received emails from scammers, they want money. They did have my Photo Net email address.

Could this be checked out.

can you forward to me?

all legacy @photo.net email addresses are just forwarding aliases and are for subscribers of v1 (as we no longer offer it with new subscriptions). In reality, there is no hack to be had there as there is no email service provided by us other than forwarding.

Hi JGaines, did you receive an e-mail that starts with something like this? Glenn and I have already discussed that with a couple other moderators two days ago.

 

Hello!

I'm a member of an international hacker group.

 

As you could probably have guessed, your account <name>@photo.net was hacked, I sent message you from it.

 

Now I have access to you accounts! You still do not believe it?

So, this is your password: mutinz , right?

 

And then they ask you to send them $700 in BitCoin, ....

 

First of all, as Glenn points out, those <name>@photo.net are not accounts. It is merely a mail-forwarding service from photo.net. E-mail sent to those addresses are forwarded to your actual e-mail address on file. Therefore, e-mail will never go out from those forwarding @photo.net addresses; they are for receiving e-mail only, and there is no password associated with them. Whoever is trying to blackmail you clearly have no idea about that. They are also just guessing some password that neither Glenn nor I recognize.

 

Additionally, occasionally I use my @photo.net alias so that people can send me e-mail. The fact that someone has that e-mail address doesn't mean anything. I have also seen spammers who just guess a bunch of e-mail addresses. For example, I have seen spam sent to:

 

john@gmail.com, michelle@gmail.com, monica@gmail.com, joe@gmail.com, jim@gmail.com ....

 

It is very trivial to do that for all sorts of @photo.net addresses, and it is also trivial to fake the "from" address for an e-mail so that it looked as if it were coming from your address. They could be spamming thousands of people. If only a couple of people who may have something to hide send them a few hundred dollars each, the spammer will make a decent amount of money for their effort, which is not much.

Edited September 27, 2018 by ShunCheung