A widespread new email scam purportedly from the WannaCry hackers attempts to shake down potential victims with threats of the ransomware if they don’t pay up-front.

But according to Sophos, which spotted the scam, the attackers don’t really have the WannaCry malware in hand. “Simply put, it’s a protection racket, where you’re being stood over to prevent bad things happening, rather than a ransom-based racket, where you are being squeezed to recover from bad things that already happened,” said Sophos senior security advisor Paul Ducklin in a post today.

Sophos, which investigated the scam, says not to pay or contact the scammers, and to use the proper security hygiene of patching and good backups.

Read more here.

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