The Unexpected Email

Episode 22: The Unexpected Email
Imagine receiving an email unexpectedly from yourself. You’d probably think that was pretty weird but you open it anyway and what you read next is even more shocking.
Someone else has access to your email and they want a ransom in bitcoin to return your email to you, and to not put all of the information found in your email on the web.
But that’s just the start of the story. It gets worse.


Transcript
People are the weakest link in any cybersecurity plan. We’re distracted, exhausted and often unmotivated. It’s time to change the approach used to protect our businesses, technology, identity and data. The human element has to be front and center in the war against data breaches and ransomware attacks. It’s time to educate.
When I was a senior in high school yearbooks were handed out as traditionally done every year, every senior year for most high schools. And actually, they’ve done for a lot of different grades in college. I think my kids have gotten it and every year they’ve been in school. But we only got him when we were seniors in high school. And we would get him signed by our friends and be messages, you know, great, great knowing you and good luck in the future and so forth. But there were a group of kids who would sneak sign yearbooks they would take people’s yearbooks, unsuspectingly and this happened to me. I had some students sign my yearbook that I never even asked to sign my yearbook was pretty cool to think about it. At the time. It was like God, it’s awesome. So and So sign my yearbook. I didn’t expect that didn’t know he was even even had my yearbook at any point. And I thought that was pretty cool. So this became a tradition in school where students would sign your books, unbeknownst to the owner of the yearbook. Sometimes it was great. Sometimes it wasn’t so great because they would write something inappropriate or mean because they didn’t like the student. But it was always unknown to the student or the owner of the yearbook that these students were signing these yearbooks. So it was sort of like they were hacking near your book signing new yearbooks. I don’t know if this tradition carries on today, at least not for your books he carries on in other ways. And we’re going to talk about that in today’s podcast. Welcome to the human element podcast, visit our website at the human element dotnet. For more content to help you strengthen your awareness of the people problem in cybersecurity. I am Scott Gombar, owner and Washtech, a client focused, security minded proactive IT service provider. Welcome to Episode 22 of the human element podcast, this episode titled, The unexpected email. So this one is a recent event that occurred to a sort of client of mine, it was a referral from an existing client. And so I’m going to be a little vague as to some of the details are going to be vague, but I’m going to explained what happened to this person, and some of the mistakes that were made along the way. And what you should know what you should be looking out for. So I’m going to start first with saying this is a person in the financial world. And that’s as detailed as I can get with that. And then we’re using an email account, a free email account. So those services like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail, sure, I’m leaving a few out. But services like that, where you don’t have to pay a monthly fee to use their email services, you’re going to see a bunch of ads within email and so forth. And they’re in the financial world. And the account was compromised. So we’ll just say like that. Now, I don’t know how the account was compromised, because we were not able to recover the account. And how it happened was the end user of the account suddenly received an email one day,