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A while ago, one longtime member shared with me an extortion scam email he had received that included his CVP password in it. Today I received a similar email that included my CVP password. If you get such emails, just ignore them. It talks about installing malware on your computer, recording your passwords, recording you through your webcam, then conveniently removing all trace of the malware from your computer. It's just a scam, not a real extortion threat.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the password it included in the email was the one for this site. Until just now, I had not changed it in years, and several years ago, all passwords here were encrypted as MD5 hashes. This is very insecure, because there is a fixed relationship between the original word and the encryption, which allows people to build translation dictionaries that can identify your password from its MD5 hash.

If there were really malware on my computer monitoring my passwords, the hacker could just as easily steal my Paypal password, which would prove lucrative without going through the trouble of trying to blackmail me.

If you have not changed your password in a long time, it will still be encrypted as an MD5 hash. To fix this, sign in and change your password. Your new password will be encrypted in a format that does not have a 1-to-1 relation with the password, and it will be much more secure. While you could keep the same password and just update its encryption, that is what I had done, and this email proved that this was not enough to protect my password. The best thing you can do to protect your password is to change it.