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psipsyWhat the subject said. Change your LJ password.
You may have seen some news directly from DW, mentioning something about getting an email saying something about "pay $800 in bitcoin", and the email also contains the email and password used to log into LJ, just to make the point. The email also claims to have installed something on the user's computer that enables them to access the camera, but that's just a scare tactic. The email itself was written by someone who doesn't know English as a first language.
How do I know it's LiveJournal that was breached and not Dreamwidth? Not only because I use different passwords for the two, but because of The Girls. Ai, Nozomi, and Yamiko all have their own email addresses, their own LJs, but not their own DW, and each one of them got that same email. I didn't see one for Gil's, but that might have been a matter of Gmail being smart enough to know it's a scam right off the bat. I changed his LJ password anyway.
Whoever cooked up this scheme is really counting on a few gullible schmucks actually paying up. That's their main goal. However, the fact that the username/password combination was leaked out remains to be a problem. That information can be sold to someone willing to exploit it, so if for whatever reason you used the same combo on other sites, change it there too. Yeah I know we're not supposed to recycle passwords but when just about every site uses a login these days, low priorities get low security, so it does happen.
Anyway. Change your LJ password if you haven't already. And if you get that email, just delete it and move on.
You may have seen some news directly from DW, mentioning something about getting an email saying something about "pay $800 in bitcoin", and the email also contains the email and password used to log into LJ, just to make the point. The email also claims to have installed something on the user's computer that enables them to access the camera, but that's just a scare tactic. The email itself was written by someone who doesn't know English as a first language.
How do I know it's LiveJournal that was breached and not Dreamwidth? Not only because I use different passwords for the two, but because of The Girls. Ai, Nozomi, and Yamiko all have their own email addresses, their own LJs, but not their own DW, and each one of them got that same email. I didn't see one for Gil's, but that might have been a matter of Gmail being smart enough to know it's a scam right off the bat. I changed his LJ password anyway.
Whoever cooked up this scheme is really counting on a few gullible schmucks actually paying up. That's their main goal. However, the fact that the username/password combination was leaked out remains to be a problem. That information can be sold to someone willing to exploit it, so if for whatever reason you used the same combo on other sites, change it there too. Yeah I know we're not supposed to recycle passwords but when just about every site uses a login these days, low priorities get low security, so it does happen.
Anyway. Change your LJ password if you haven't already. And if you get that email, just delete it and move on.
