Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Patreon Users Threatened By Ashley Madison Scammers (csoonline.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the give-us-your-money dept.

itwbennett writes: "Over the last few days, the group responsible for extortion attempts and death threats against Ashley Madison users has turned to a new set of targets – Patreon users," writes CSO's Steve Ragan. A message sent from the same account used in previous campaigns by the scammers demands a payment of 1 BTC or else the Patreon user will have their personal information exposed. "The [Bitcoin] wallet being used by the group has barely collected anything," says Ragan, "suggesting that after their massive push towards Ashley Madison users, people have stopped falling for their scams."

3 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing to hide by supremebob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The "problem" that they're having with threatening to dox Patreon users is that most of them don't have a dirty secret that they're trying to hide like the Ashley Madison folks.

    Hey... if you want to "out" people for donating to good causes, go ahead! They'll probably get more sympathy than anything else. Odds are that you're just going to piss off a rival hacking group like Anonymous who's going to return the favor against the scammers.

    1. Re:Nothing to hide by sheetsda · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They're threatening to release SSN and related information that is being used as verification for credit applications, etc. The companies negligently using SSN as a verification mechanism is where we (the public) need to start suing in order to clean up this mess.

    2. Re:Nothing to hide by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Technically, they do... The September Patreon leak had ENCRYPTED tax form data, but the keys to access it were never in that data leak, and even if they had 10 million bots in a botnet to try and crack the RSA key for the tax form informaiton, that's a largely disproportionate amount of CPU time dedicated to trying to decrypt information that is effectively worthless to criminals outside of the US.

      As for leaking any damaging information .... the Patreon data leak was back in September, it wouldn't matter if they leaked anything they have or not, the people who would be "worst damaged" from the leak would be the people who are paying artists to draw them porn. Oh boo hoo. Finding anything that someone would want to pay for to keep buried on Patreon is pretty hard, considering that people that don't speak or read English wouldn't know what kind of information would be considered embarrassing. Nobody is going to kill themselves over Patreon, nobody. Most of the "porn" on Patreon is of the furry variety, and at worst, furries aren't embarrassed to be furries.