Remember LJ?

[kate_schaefer]

Remember back when we were all on LiveJournal and it belonged to some techie guys in the Bay Area? Remember when they sold it to some techie guys in Russia and promised that everything would stay the same? Remember when that turned out not to be true, and people fled to Dreamwidth instead? Remember when the Russians said the new terms of service would only be available in Russian? That's the point where I fled to Dreamwidth and left my LJ account to rot in peace.

Well, today I got email from some scammer saying he'd hacked my account and infected my computer with malware and stolen all my contacts and unless I sent him some Bitcoins he'd fry my data and post all my naughty pictures, taken with the camera on my computer, from all the nasty websites I frequent. He didn't say which account he'd hacked, but since he specified a password, I knew it had to be LJ. It was a password I hadn't used on LJ for about a year before leaving, and I'd never used it on any other system. In general, I don't re-use passwords. I left LJ about a year and a half ago, though I didn't delete the account.

I am not trembling in fear. My computer has no camera. I don't frequent nasty websites. I have no naughty pictures. I don't store my contacts in an address book, because I know that address books are a traditional weak point in computer security. I assume this scammer is just making threats to everyone he can find, hoping that some percentage of them will be frightened enough to send him some money. After all, the Internet is mainly pornography and cats, like most of the rest of the world. It's just that scammer's bad luck that I'm not interested in pornography.

If you get similar email, I suggest that you mostly ignore it. Go ahead and run a scan and make sure your anti-malware software is up to date. If you're still posting to LJ, do make sure that you're not using a password you use on any other account.

Comments

[ckd]

I didn't get one (yet, anyway) for LJ; I used a strong password there that I didn't reuse anywhere else, so I suspect they just haven't managed to crack it yet and even if they do IDGAF. They did send me email at a very old Etown account address with my Etown password...that I'd never bothered to change from the one they emailed me in plaintext. :-D

[kate_schaefer]

I am cynically wondering if the scammer is an ex-employee of LJ, or if they bought lists of users and passwords from an ex-employee. Given how very old my password was, the hacked (or purchased) list would also have to be pretty old.

[ckd]

I suspect it was "just" a garden-variety breach rather than a sale of information, but in the end it doesn't really matter which method got the scammers a copy of the user/password database.

[calimac]

It sounds like nonsense anyway. If he had your LJ password he could do anything he wanted with your LJ account, but I don't see how he could get into your personal computer.

[kate_schaefer]

Well, no, of course not. It's a scam rather than a genuine threat.

[redbird]

The scammers have moved on from claiming to have hacked my actual email, to having hacked "anon@redbird.org," which neither I nor anyone has ever used for anything involving a password. That's aside from the fact that while I have a webcam, I think I've removed the cover from its lens for a total of about five minutes.

[kate_schaefer]

This kind of scam does make me happier about my lack of webcam.

[lcohen]

i got this for a password i used on okcupid, and linkedin, so i wasn't sure which one of those got hacked but i haven't gotten one for LJ yet. since i have paper covering all of my webcams, i knew it was garbage.

[kate_schaefer]

This was at least less annoying than the one claiming the sheriff's department was after me for failing to show up for jury duty, which has become so common that the sheriff's department is no longer bothering to collect info about it, though it still has a notice on the website asking people to call and report it.

[jinasphinx]

My husband got that scammer too.
This is an interesting site to check out every so often: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

[kate_schaefer]

Hmm. It shows one breach for my email address, but it doesn't list LiveJournal in its big list of breaches. I have to assume this is because LiveJournal wasn't big enough to be part of the big time.