I've got custom domain names with catch-all emails, and I've seen this kind of phishing scam / spam emails sent to <random letters>@<domain name> from time to time. Just yesterday one arrived and was in a different language (Japanese) from any I'd ever registered as knowing on any web site (just English!). It obviously did not successfully hack the any accounts belonging to or associated with the completely made up email address the scam was sent to.

I have seen others sent to real email addresses with real (terrible, previous breached) passwords. But again there was no real access to anything, since those emails/passwords only belonged to the breached web sites (i.e. Adobe.com!)

Obviously these are different from some of the attacks in the article.

> It also posted a screen grab of the computer's file library which included more than a dozen folders catalogued...

I get these sometimes, usually they want some bitcoin dumped in an address, and reference your "password" which is clearly one from an old account that was hacked. Usually I look online for the address and find the other people they sent it to. But these are the amateurs looking for easy victims.

Plus the other approach is: hack, insert porn/embarrassment, extort.

I hope the ultimate outcome is the rise of shamelessness - such as Jeff Bezo's response a while back, "sure, you have a picture of me, go ahead, so what".