Here’s the tl;dr – someone named “Md. Shofiur R” found troyhunt.com on a “free online malware scanner” and tried to scare me into believing my site had security vulnerabilities then shake me down for a penetration test. It didn’t work out so well for him, here’s the blow-by-blow account of things then I’ll add some…

You know how banks really, really want to avoid their customers falling victim to phishing scams? And how they put a heap of effort into education to warn folks about the hallmarks of phishing scams? And how banks are the shining beacons of light when it comes to demonstrating security best practices? Ok, that final…

I actually thought that once I didn’t bother connecting a landline after moving house recently, it would be the end of scam calls. I used to get them all the time – the ones where they’d call up and say you had viruses on your PC – and my recordings of those turned out to…

So someone sent me this on the weekend: They asked me to censor the Bitcoin address because as you can see above, it’s unique to them and quite understandably, they don’t want anything that can tie this blackmail attempt back to them going public. Except that the address is a perfect match with this one:…

Update: Literally an hour after posting this, I had another call running the same scam. As suggested earlier, I broadcast this one via Periscope and you can can go back and watch it via the app. I’ll be more organised next time and have a special machine ready for them 🙂 These things just don’t…

I thought I’d seen it all when it comes to cold call virus scammers, you know, the guys who call you up from “Windows” because they’ve had reports of viruses from your machine? I’ve recorded their audio, recorded their video, antagonised them, interviewed one of the blokes behind it, tried to tell them I was…

The phone rings from a concealed number and you pick up: Hello? Silence. More silence. Eventually a foreign voice enters: Hi, this is your bank, we need you to verify some details. This is the point where you should be disclosing absolutely nothing, at least nothing that is not known already which is probably just…

As regular readers will know by now, I’m not real fond of virus call centre scammers. You know, the ones who call you up while you’re making dinner or bathing and kids and tell you they’re from Microsoft and that your PC is infected with blah blah polymorphic blah? There’s a bunch of material on…

I’m frequently amused by the sort of stuff my Facebook friends “like”. For example: The more salacious content you find around Facebook often has a hidden agenda, for example the classic She did WHAT in school scam I wrote about last year. Snapchat allows you to take a pic or a video and set an…

Regular readers of this blog would have seen sagas such as Anatomy of a virus call centre scam, Scamming the scammers – catching the virus call centre scammers red-handed and my personal favourite, “Type www.” – “Ok, w-w-w-d-o-t”; antagonising call centre scammers. That’s not an exhaustive list, indeed there are more videos on this blog…