If you receive an email, or message through another medium (contact form, Facebook, whatever) and someone is claiming they hacked your website and demanding a ransom in order to avoid “destroying your reputation” or destroying your website in some way, it is a scam.
I receive dozens of these emails a week, and have a unique vantage point as a webmaster. It can be really scary to receive a threat like this, but trust me, if they had access to your website, they would be able to notify you in a different way.
Even if your emails seem to come from you, or another email address with one of your website URLs, the “From” field can be manipulated fairly easily, with a technique we call spoofing.
Here is one I received just today. It is written with fairly correct English, and does a good job with the intimidation language. These ones are so interesting, because the alleged positive result would be…well…nothing…if you sent off your bitcoin, you’d never really know if it had been real or not.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO SOMEONE IN YOUR COMPANY WHO IS ALLOWED TO MAKE IMPORTANT DECISIONS!
We have hacked your website https://www.krishnahawk.com and extracted your databases.
How did this happen?
Our team has found a vulnerability within your site that we were able to exploit. After finding the vulnerability we were able to get your database credentials and extract your entire database and move the information to an offshore server.
Our team has found a vulnerability within your site that we were able to exploit. After finding the vulnerability we were able to get your database credentials and extract your entire database and move the information to an offshore server.
What does this mean?
We will systematically go through a series of steps of totally damaging your reputation. First your database will be leaked or sold to the highest bidder which they will use with whatever their intentions are. Next if there are e-mails found they will be e-mailed that their information has been sold or leaked and your https://www.krishnahawk.com was at fault thusly damaging your reputation and having angry customers/associates with whatever angry customers/associates do. Lastly any links that you have indexed in the search engines will be de-indexed based off of blackhat techniques that we used in the past to de-index our targets.
How do I stop this?
We are willing to refrain from destroying your site’s reputation for a small fee. The current fee is $3000 in bitcoins (0.14 BTC).
The amount(approximately): $3000 (0.14 BTC)
The Address Part 1: bc1qe4xvhksgapl3p76mm
The Address Part 2: fz7thdnmkeuxry08kjhcn
How do I stop this?
So, you have to manually copy + paste Part1 and Part2 in one string made of 42 characters with no space between the parts that start with “b” and end with “n” is the actually address where you should send the money to.
Once you have paid we will automatically get informed that it was your payment. Please note that you have to make payment within 72 hours after receiving this message or the database leak, e-mails dispatched, and de-index of your site WILL start!
How do I get Bitcoins?
You can easily buy bitcoins via several websites or even offline from a Bitcoin-ATM.
How do I get Bitcoins?
If you decide not to pay, we will start the attack at the indicated date and uphold it until you do, there’s no counter measure to this, you will only end up wasting more money trying to find a solution. We will completely destroy your reputation amongst google and your customers.
This is not a hoax, do not reply to this email, don’t try to reason or negotiate, we will not read any replies. Once you have paid we will stop what we were doing and you will never hear from us again!
Please note that Bitcoin is anonymous and no one will find out that you have complied.