Advice Following Scam
- Thread starter polomolo
- Start date
SpyderTracks
We love you Ukraine
A Windows reset will not remove any embedded virus's.
That being said, what makes you think this person had webcam and control of your pc? Did you see any suspect programs running?
What laptop is this, can you post the make and model?
This is a very common scam and let me start by assuring you that they have NOT got access to your web cam.
I get three or four of these a day!
What makes them seem more legitimate is that they know your email address and a password. But - and here's the rub - they got the password from a dump of the many sales of such things that various low lives have compiled and sold on.
It usually follows the same (badly written) modus operandi:
I placed a virus on your computer/phone/tablet. Here's your email address and (a) password.
My virus took control of your webcam/phone camera and I took a video of you performing certain acts whilst watching "inappropriate" material and if you don't pay x bitcoin I will release it to all of your contacts.
Sound familiar?
Ignore it and whatever you do DO NOT PAY!
Edit: Might I suggest making this a sticky?
I get three or four of these a day!
What makes them seem more legitimate is that they know your email address and a password. But - and here's the rub - they got the password from a dump of the many sales of such things that various low lives have compiled and sold on.
It usually follows the same (badly written) modus operandi:
I placed a virus on your computer/phone/tablet. Here's your email address and (a) password.
My virus took control of your webcam/phone camera and I took a video of you performing certain acts whilst watching "inappropriate" material and if you don't pay x bitcoin I will release it to all of your contacts.
Sound familiar?
Ignore it and whatever you do DO NOT PAY!
Edit: Might I suggest making this a sticky?
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By the way - Gmail allows you to use something called "plus modifiers" on email addresses, so if you have [email protected] you can sign up to say Amazon with [email protected] and eBay with [email protected]
That way in future, you know if your email address is somehow compromised, exactly which site it came from.
Office 365/Outlook.com - no support for it yet, unfortunately.
That way in future, you know if your email address is somehow compromised, exactly which site it came from.
Office 365/Outlook.com - no support for it yet, unfortunately.
SpyderTracks
We love you Ukraine
I love those emails, they make me wet myself, we’ve had a round going through a customer and they’re hysterical sometimes.
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Turns out the bad English in these, as well as a mechanism to try and circumvent spam filters, is actually also used as an intelligence filter - the people that reply are generally more likely to be susceptible to persuasion.
There's a research piece about it available online somewhere from Microsoft Research. Makes an interesting read.
SpyderTracks
We love you Ukraine
Sorry, just allowed it
Chassis & Display Recoil Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD 72 % NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® CoreTM i7 Six Core Processor 8750H (2.2GHz, 4.1GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM) 4GB Corsair 2133MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 4GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti - 4.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1
1st Hard Disk 500GB SERIAL ATA III 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
Processor (CPU) Intel® CoreTM i7 Six Core Processor 8750H (2.2GHz, 4.1GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM) 4GB Corsair 2133MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 4GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti - 4.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1
1st Hard Disk 500GB SERIAL ATA III 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
Oussebon
Multiverse Poster
That's a bit like asking how to mow your lawn without the grass getting shorter.
If you want to do a clean install of Windows, that's going to involve getting rid of everything on the disk.
You can do a clean install like so: https://www.groovypost.com/howto/clean-install-Windows-10/
You may want to establish what is causing the system to run slowly first. Perhaps checking task manager to see if there is high CPU, disk or other usage would be a place to start.
SpyderTracks
We love you Ukraine
Your specs are very underpowered if those are still the specs you're using:
4GB RAM will just about be enough to handle windows on it's own. It will cause severe bottlenecking for any other programs and certainly gaming of any kind.
The HDD is a slooow HDD and will be a bottleneck to program launches and general windows speeds.
ubuysa
The BSOD Doctor
I'm afraid those two objectives are mutually exclusive.
Spot on. Information is key, so find out why you have a slow system and then act.
Yes and yes. If you're paging from RAM (and with only 4GB you probably are) and with that slow HDD (which is probably more than about 60% full too I'll bet) your system will be very very sluggish indeed.
Start the Windows Resource Monitor and look at the header for the Memory section, on there is a Hard Faults/sec counter. If that counter is consistently more than 0 then you are paging from RAM and that will make your system slow. More RAM will be the only good solution there.
Now look at the header for the Disk section, on there is a % Highest Active Time counter, if that stays close to 100 much of the time then your HDD is (also) slowing you down. To improve HDD performance do the following...
1. Uninstall all programs you don't use
2. Archive all data you don't use but want to keep to an external HDD
3. Delete all data you no longer use and don't need to keep
4. Run the Windows disk Clean-up tool and check all boxes to delete everything you can with that tool
5. Run the Windows defrag tool to defragment the HDD
If the disk is still more than about 60% full then be more aggressive with items 2 & 3. In the long term upgrading to a 7200rpm drive will be better, an SSD will make a huge difference.
SpyderTracks
We love you Ukraine
Happens to be in the papers today:
https://www.theguardian.com/technol...mail-sextortion-webcam?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
https://www.theguardian.com/technol...mail-sextortion-webcam?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other