So I got an email today saying that my email address and password had been found in a Spam List (along with 711 Million other people “that’s almost one address for every single man, woman and child in all of Europe”), hosted on servers in Holland, created by people from all around the world. It was discovered by someone, not in Holland, I was made aware of it by someone from Australia. And it affects me (I live in the UK), I changed my email password. [More on that at the very end of this post]
Side note: You can check if your details were in that list too by typing your email address in here: https://haveibeenpwned.com/
This got me thinking, should the internet (notice no capital I anymore!) be classed as a country, with its own police and investigation units (The FBII Federal Beuro of Internet Investigations? or FIBI Federal Internet Beuro of Investigations, personally I prefer FIIB but it doesn’t quite work…)
Maybe you could even become a digital ‘citizen’ of Internet Land, pay taxes (in Bitcoin ฿? or have free citizenship for watching more adverts/buying more stuff)?
Of course, we would need a flag, and would land based countries the internet passes through/over/under charge a tax on this? Could you have dual citizenship? What about countries that restrict the internet? Would their citizens have to leave to join our new country? What about offenders, someone who brakes the internet laws, and internet oversight, who would vote for our leaders or would Robots with Artificial Intelligence rule over us? And protection, it takes a lot of cables all over the world to make the internet work, all sorts of undersea things and space things and boats, who is going to protect those from the pirates and nerdo-wells.
I’m just thinking out loud really, maybe I need my own Blog to write these types of things on,
Sorry everyone
Mike 🙂
P.S Here is my advice for anyone else affected by being in that Spam List, feel free to copy/paste this to send to a friend if they were also in the list.
Hello
It looks like you (along with me, and 711 Million other people “that’s almost one address for every single man, woman and child in all of Europe”) have had some details leaked online in a spam list, these are usually lists made up of other data found online by the makers of the spam list.
You can check if your email address was in the list by going here and doing a search for your email https://haveibeenpwned.com/
This particular spam list seems to contain email addresses and passwords with the hope that those passwords will allow whoever has the spam list to send emails as that person. so, for example, my record might look like “[email protected] | ThisIsAPassword” – the spammers then try to send emails from my helpful books email address using those login details.
So my advice:
- Have a read of the description of what has been lost https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#OnlinerSpambot
- Change your email password (and if you use that same password in multiple places then change those too)
- Consider using a Password manager and have all your passwords different https://www.pcinnercircle.co.uk/index.php/2016/09/how-to-stop-remembering-passwords-using-lastpass/
- Don’t worry too much about this one, some of the data seems quite old, Just keep an eye out for spam emails coming to you as often there is an increase just after something like this happens.
- If in doubt about an email/phone call take 5, stop and think, don’t tell them anything, don’t reply. Read more here: https://www.pcinnercircle.co.uk/index.php/2016/10/take-five-to-stop-fraud/
Sorry much to do there 🙁
Let me know if you want even more detail, there are some interesting articles about this spam list one well-written piece is here http://www.zdnet.com/article/onliner-spambot-largest-ever-malware-campaign-millions/ There are few very technical pieces too which might be of interest, just let me know if you are and I will point you in the right direction.
Hope this helps
Mike 🙂
