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I received an email apparently sent from my own email saying that they had hacked my computer and that I had to send £750 to a Bitcom address otherwise they would expose all the porn that I have been watching. Not an issue because I would not have a clue how to download porn let alone watch it.
My worry is that they were able to send from my email and they put one of my passwords in the email to show that they had access to my computer.
Any advice as to how to deal with this situation please.
I have full Norton protection on the laptop and use windows 10.
most grateful for help.

I get upward of ten of these a day.

It is an exceptionally easy trick to make an email appear to come from whomsoever you want, I use it all the time as I have numerous email addresses (more than 100) but only actually send from a relatively small number. Every company I deal with gets a unique email address, that way when I get spam in my direction I can tell exactly where my email address was leaked form.

Most of the current spam mails along this line that are currently doing the rounds are from a database that was put together a number of years ago, it also included passwords - I get emails telling me what my password was on some old accounts.

However email security has moved on, spam detectors will pick up that emails are being sent from the wrong place and most of these false emails will be automatically flagged as spam.

If you feel you have concern, just change your password, they claim they can track the password, they can't unless you have malware on computer.

I don't rate Norton but that is another story.

Thanks digging that's a great consolation. It was the password bit that was bothering me. Most grateful

I've had a couple of these in my junk mail,I just report them as phishing,haven't had any more since.

Mail spoofing is very easy. Its just a case of masking the real "from" address with yours. If you go into the mail properties you will find the real address.

Thanks very much

Thanks for all comments. Put my mind at rest. Much appreciated

News article yesterday:

770 million email addresses and passwords found in huge data breach
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/17/770m_emails_passwords_breach_collection_1/

Old news from 2017 regurgitated by the media https://www.zdnet.com/article/onliner-spambot-largest-ever-malware-campaign-millions/

I've been thinking about this a bit more and realise I have only been looking at it in one direction (ie the spoofing/sending of emails).

I would suggest changing your password (and ignore the spam email suggesting they can track the change).

From the plethora of these emails I get it seems obvious that most of them don't have the password list anyway. Safest passwords are long passwords, they only need a small amount of complexity eg

peoplepeoplepeoplePeoPle

Annoyingly the rules most websites put in place can make it more likely that passwords are cracked .... how many people capitalise the first letter and put the punctuation on the end! Axyu55! is much more crackable than the above example and yet is less memorable.

This is a fun site to check your password strenght.https://random-ize.com/how-long-to-hack-pass/