Some weird happenings

xK Marcus

Not sure where to post this, assuming this is the best place. Over the last month or so I've been having a lot of probable security breaches. It started with my credit card information being stolen and used in London, and the Dominican Republic, luckily my bank caught on fairly quickly and I didn't lose anything. Then a couple of weeks ago my house was broken in to (assuming and hoping unrelated, otherwise it would be a bit creepy..). There was the whole heartbleed bug thing, and I got an email from Turbobit.net telling me I had registered with their service, and told me the password I used, which is a password I use for a few things (not my email or anything too important), I saw that I wasn't the only one that this happened to. And now this morning I've just gotten an email from someone pretending to be my Mum, with my Mum's email address from Yahoo.com instead of Gmail.com, it was as follows.

Hi

Please pardon my ignorance for reaching out to you this way, sorry i
didn't inform you of my trip, it was urgent. Am in a terrible
situation right now and will need your urgent help. I am in Limassol,
Cyprus at the moment I just misplaced my bag containing all my vital
items, phone and money. I am trying to sort things out with the
necessary authorities, I may need a little help from you.

I'm certain I don't have any viruses or anything like that, I do scans every few weeks and did one last night even. So someone knows my Mum's email address, and is obviously trying to get money from me.... Do I just ignore this, what do I do?

AnCatDubh

xK Marcus wrote: »

I'm certain I don't have any viruses or anything like that, I do scans every few weeks and did one last night even. So someone knows my Mum's email address, and is obviously trying to get money from me.... Do I just ignore this, what do I do?

How about your mum's machine? What's the potential of her machine being compromised / virus / keylogger / etc....., some automated bot scamming her contacts, them finding a free account of the same name at yahoo and claiming it upon which they launch a social engineering attach (away from home and just lost everything).

Given that you have what you consider to be a clean machine / operating environment, the next one to suspect is your mums.

The email address that they've given need not necessarily be valid as they look like they are going to build the social story and contact you again.

Mind you, you do appear to have suffered your share of bad luck.

xK Marcus

AnCatDubh wrote: »

How about your mum's machine? What's the potential of her machine being compromised / virus / keylogger / etc....., some automated bot scamming her contacts, them finding a free account of the same name at yahoo and claiming it upon which they launch a social engineering attach (away from home and just lost everything).

I'm fairly certain my Mum's laptop is alright, she had a Mac, and while I'm not very knowledgeable on Macs, I'm told they're quite difficult to infect. It appears that my Mum's email had been hacked, and I've recovered it for her now. They had reset the recovery phone number, and added the Yahoo email address to be forwarded all the mail, which I've removed now. I'm thinking it is just an unlucky string of events now, but I'll be continuing to keep a watchful eye open on our personal security for the foreseeable future.