Today many have received an email titled “Your Site Has Been Hacked” claiming that your site had been hacked. This is a scam that’s pretty common at the moment – the scammers are blasting out the same template e-mail to millions of site owners.
It doesn’t look like a particularly successful scam either – we’ve seen the following bitcoin addresses used:
In total the scammers have received 0.42 Bitcoins – worth about $4000 at the time of writing.
Curiously – we have seen some websites defaced with a very similar message. It may be the scammers have realised they don’t need to actually compromise sites to get money – or they may be impersonating attackers that do:
Regardless – if you receive an email with the template below – it is probably a scam and there is no reason to send them any money, hopefully helping get the word out will save someone the effort, time and money…
Subject: "Your Site Has Been Hacked"From: Olivia Furnell
Subject: Your Site Has Been HackedMessage Body:
PLEASE FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO SOMEONE IN YOUR COMPANY WHO IS ALLOWED TO MAKE IMPORTANT DECISIONS!We have hacked your website 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.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 site http:// 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 $2000 USD in bitcoins (BTC).
Send the bitcoin to the following Bitcoin address (Copy and paste as it is case sensitive):
14S9qL8jxxFYyAT58vqnpFtkjg3vrF17g7
Once you have paid we will automatically get informed that it was your payment. Please note that you have to make payment within 5 days after receiving this notice 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. We suggest you https://cex.io/ for buying bitcoins.
What if I don’t pay?
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.