Hello and welcome to the Tuesday, January 21st, 2020 edition of the Sandtonet Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich and I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

We got a couple of items of leftover from last week that I would like to cover. One is sort of a new twist on these extortion emails.

Now, we have seen them, of course, a lot last year.

However, late last year, just before the holidays,

there were a number of stories that suggested that ring cameras,

the security cameras that have become quite popular,

are easily hacked. Well, it looks like

these extortion scammers are now sort of jumping on that bandwagon instead of claiming that

your laptop camera was compromised. They're now actually going after the Nest camera. Note that

they didn't actually compromise it.

Just like all the other sextortion emails, there is nothing behind these emails.

They're just making the claim.

What's also a little bit odd and different here, instead of actually providing a lot of detail

within the email about how much to pay and how to pay. They just give you login credentials

for a proton mail email account and ask you, hey, log into this email account and that's

where we will show you how much to pay and how to pay, which usually evolves around sort of $500 in Bitcoins.

Of course, one malware gang that's always pretty up to date when it comes to the latest and

greatest email rules to get people to install their malware is Emotet.

And the latest trick they're using is an email that sort of follows the extortion

game in claiming that your computer is hacked.

And then of course you have to open this special Word document to figure out how to get it cleaned

up. And they typically ask something like $50 or $100 to get that accomplished.

...