Attempts at blackmail scams concerning an allegedly hacked site or blog do not weaken. Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr has even identified a new wave that targets many French sites.
The platform Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr remembers unearthing the first messages of attempted blackmail scams to the supposedly hacked website or blog in early 2020. Since then, this threat of sending an email to the owner of a website to inform him that he has just been hacked has become common, and a new wave is even raging this fall in France.
A well-established hacking scam
How do malicious individuals bring this threat to life? The scheme is simple: a stranger sends an e-mail to a company or the owner of a site, letting him know that he has just hacked the latter and that he was able to extract and thus copy his entire database. data on a server located abroad.
Playing on the psychological spring, the individual then indicates having succeeded in discovering and exploiting a vulnerability of the website to obtain the login credentials to the database, and carry out his little pirate business.
He then uses various means to put pressure on the victim, taking care to specify that he will disclose and/or sell the contents of the database to the highest bidder and will even go so far as to contact his customers to inform them of the hack. of the company, if the latter does not accept the consideration. The scammer even goes so far as to threaten his target with de-referencing or de-indexing the site in search engines.
Nothing to panic about, but something to report
The counterpart is obviously a ransom, often of the order of several thousand dollars, to be honored in a virtual currency such as Bitcoin. Under this hacking scam, it usually has to be paid within five days of receiving the message from the hackers. What should we fear from these contacts and alleged hacks?
In fact, nothing at all. We remain here in the case of a banal scam which aims to defraud victims who are not very observant or who can easily give in to panic, through the prism of fear. There are no data leaks or hacks here. ” Although this type of hacking is feasible in theory, the fact remains that it is a technically complex operation, long to implement and which requires significant resources. », wants to reassure Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr.
These blackmail scams are inspired by hacked webcam scams, where the scammer claims to have hacked into the victim’s computer, threatening to publish compromising images from his webcam following the consultation of a pornographic site.
So in the event that you receive such an e-mail, you should at worst not respond, and at best take some screenshots to report it to the authorities and appropriate devices, such as Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr.
Source : Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr
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