This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Use the "passwords" feature to check if one of yours is compromised. If it shows up, never ever reuse those credentials. They'll be baked into thousands of botnets etc. and be forevermore part of automated break-in attempts until one randomly succeeds.
Protip for the room: Use a password manager with a unique password for every service. Then when one leaks, it only affects that singular service, not large swaths of your digital life.
And an email alias.
I hate how many places don't allow for + aliases. I want to know who leaked my email.
No + required. There are hundreds of companies offering aliases using their shared domain. You can also just generate a temporary email address if you don't require any ongoing communication and the account is not super important.
At the same time, it is trivially easy to strip a + alias, so I'd not trust it to do anything much at all.
Don't forget unique email addresses. I've had two spam emails in the last 6 months, I could trace them to exactly which company I gave that email address to (one data breach, one I'm pretty sure was the company selling my data). I can block those addresses and move on with my life.
My old email address from before I started doing this still receives 10+ spam emails a day.
I've started using {emailaddress}+{sitename}@gmail.com i.e. myemail+xyzCompany@gmail.com
That way I can at least see who sold my info. I wish I would have started doing this long ago though. Some sites dont let you use the plus symbol even though it's valid though
This trick is common enough and trivial to reverse engineer. I can just purge my billion-email-address hacked list of all characters between a + and an @ and have a clean list that untraceable with your system.
Right? Has this ever worked for anyone? I've never bothered because of how easy it is for spammers to bypass.
Spammers go for the easiest targets. If you do stuff like this, they might redesign their system to make it LESS likely to send to you. Keep in mind theyre targetting the elederly, mentally handicapped, and the emotionally desperate. They specifically DO NOT want to target the educated, technologically literate, and those that will waste their time. By attempting to technologically limit them from their scams, you make it more difficult for them to target you and it makes it obvious theyre not worth your time.
Its not about making yourself scam proof, its about making yourself an unappealing target.
(This all applies to scam emails, dunno if it has any effect if the goal is phishing but i would imagine so. If they can phish 5 people in the time it takes to phish you, youre no longer their target.)
Edit: this is why scam emails look obviously scammy, with misspelled words and grammarical errors. Its not a mistake, its an attempt to preemptively weed out people who want to waste their time
Also 2FA. You'll still want to change passwords but it buys you time.
Also, length is most of what matters. A full length sentence in lowercase with easy to type finger/key flow for pw manager master, and don't know a single other password. Can someone correct me if I'm wrong?
For me, if this happens, it has no impact since almost every page i sign up to has a unique password. The most important ones has mfa as well.
Use a password manager. Simple.
Stuffing? Just in time for the holiday season!
moans "stuff me santa"
Santa: "we are skipping that house"
This is the type of unhinged shit I signed up for!
The thing about this one is no one seems sure of the source (it appears to be from multiple sources, including infostealer malware and phishing attacks), so you don't know which passwords to change. To be safe you'd have to do all of them.
Some password managers (e.g. Bitwarden) offer an automatic check for whether your actual passwords have been seen in these hack databases, which is a bit more practical than changing hundreds of passwords just in case.
And of course don't reuse passwords. If you have access to an email masking service you can not only use a different password for every site, but also a different email address. Then hackers can't even easily connect that it's your account on different sites.
God fucking dammit, I fucking hate seeing people self-censor themselves on the internet.
As someone who consults in the IT Security space, It's bad out there. Contractors and BYOD companies are downright sheepish in asking their outsourced employees to do anything security-related to their devices. The biggest attack vector is allowed unfettered remote access (and therefore the whole company and any bad actors are also granted unfettered remote access)
I still can't get over how quickly companies-at-large have abandoned VPN Servers (removing network trust from the list of options as well)
I'm down to managed browsers via IdP, and I just can't wait for the objections to that as well. People out here offering their faces to leopards. Certificate-based MFA on all the things IMO - passwords shouldnt matter (but six digit MFA codes aren't immune to fake landing pages and siphoned MFA tokens that don't expire)
Let's make a master list of all the emails leaked with their passwords, what could go wrong?
That’s not how it works
It's exactly how it worked. A company called synthient made a master list with all the leaked emails + all leaked passwords. Then they were hacked and it leaked
Synthient wasn’t hacked, as a security company, they aggregated tons of stealer logs dumped to social media, Telegram, etc.
They found 8% of the data collected was not in the HIBP database, confirmed with some of the legitimate owners that the data was real.
They then took that research and shared it with HIBP which is the correct thing to do.
I was also thrown off by the title they gave it when I first saw it, a security company being hacked would be a terrible look. but they explain it in the article. Should probably have named it “list aggregation” or something.
Someone should make a list of all the leaked credentials that got leaked.
Yeah gotta make sure you never use the same password in multiple places, use a password manager.
Comprised of email addresses and passwords from previous data breaches,
So these are previously “hacked” data, and now the aggregator has been hacked?
