This has been happening for a little bit of time now. I receive an email from my own account and the message says I’ve been hacked. They also say they’ve made videos of me jerking off to weird porn and for a payment of several hundred in bitcoin they won’t release the video. I just erase the emails because I know its crap, but how do they make it seem to originate from my own account?
In: Technology
Think of receiving an email like getting a letter in the mail. It’s fairly trivial and there’s often nothing enforcing someone from writing whatever name they want as the sender on the envelope.
Letters have envelopes, and you can write whatever you want on them. Emails have “headers” that contain information like the sender name/email, the subject, etc, and you can forge information in the headers just the same.
Edit: And to continue the envelope analogy, if I mailed you a letter but put your name/address as both the from and to addresses, there would be evidence that you didn’t send yourself the letter: the postmark would be from a different city or state. And the same thing with forged email headers – there is evidence in the headers that will clearly show you it was forged if you know what to look for.
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