All the poor people who believe they have been "hacked"

[Spamnophobic]

I do feel sorry for the people on compromised mail lists who are in panic because they think criminals have "hacked" their e-mail accounts and pay thousands to extortionists, but sadly I can no longer help them. I did try to warn them.

Typically a poorly secured website will be turned over by criminals, who will harvest every user detail, certainly including e-mail addresses, that they can find on the site. The poor users will then start to receive e-mails "from themselves" purporting that this means that their details are now known to the criminals, who demand extortionate payments in bitcoin etc. The users fall for this, pay up and supply still more details. The misery never ends. If you get such a scam e-mail, all you ever need to do is report it to SpamCop because it is just, still spam. spam spam spam. They don't have your details, all they ever have is the e-mail address you gave to the compromised site. Make sure any further mail to that address gets reported to SpamCop. It's not worth reporting the attack to the administrator of the website that was compromised because they were obviously clueless to get their site attacked in the first place. Warn your fellow members if you can. Don't use the compromised e-mail address again.

But that's all the spammers have, honestly. They forge that address as the sender's address for the spam: it's trivial to forge any address as the sending address of an e-mail. That's how e-mail works because it was designed in a time that nobody thought about security or could imagine spam. But it means nothing else. They haven't "hacked you", they just try to make you believe they have.

[ninth]

Change password