Overview
There are multiple scams which exist to try and trick you into believing your website has been hacked. One of these such emails has the subject “Your Site Has Been Hacked” or may simply come in via your website contact form.
They will generally be asking for a payment by Bitcoin or they will release details such as your database.
Here’s part of what this email looks like:
Subject: Your Site Has Been Hacked
Message Body:
PLEASE FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO SOMEONE IN YOUR COMPANY WHO IS ALLOWED TO MAKE IMPORTANT DECISIONS!
We have hacked your website <YOURWEBSITE> and extracted your databases.
How did this happen?
Our team has found a vulnerability within your site that we were able to exploit. After finding the vulnerability we were able to get your database credentials and extract your entire database and move the information to an offshore server.
What does this mean?
We will systematically go through a series of steps of totally damaging your reputation. First your database will be leaked or sold to the highest bidder which they will use with whatever their intentions are. Next if there are e-mails found they will be e-mailed that their information has been sold or leaked and your site <YOURWEBSITE> was at fault thusly damaging your reputation and having angry customers/associates with whatever angry customers/associates do. Lastly any links that you have indexed in the search engines will be de-indexed based off of blackhat techniques that we used in the past to de-index our targets.
...While we suggest you always ensure your website is kept up-to-date, please just DELETE this email as it’s a fake scam.