Live data from Hacker News

Finding vulnerable Twitter accounts with expired domains

zainamro.com

11–20 of 128 posts

Re: Finding vulnerable Twitter accounts with expired domains

#11
post #7

What would be a universal solution to this problem? The only thing I can really think of is platforms not allowing custom domains for connected email accounts, but that seems sub-optimal.

What does "custom domain for connected email accounts" mean? Isn't every domain custom? Do you mean anything that isn't @gmail.com?

Yes, roughly speaking any domain you registered yourself.

Re: Finding vulnerable Twitter accounts with expired domains

#12
At some point in time we decided that email addresses control the keys to the kingdom. If you lose access to your email, there goes your social media accounts, your bank accounts, your gaming accounts, and potentially many of your commercial accounts as well.

And then we decided that custom domains are the most professional. Which does make sense, there can only be one 'robert@gmail.com'. But, this is coupled with the idea that domains can expire, and that expiry does not appear to kill the identity that's potentially associated with the domain.

We should not be using email addresses as our primary source of identity verification in the first place. And we definitely _should_ have some way to globally declare that an identity has been compromised. Especially given our society's track record of keeping database safe from breach.

I more or less assume it is inevitable that one of my major accounts will be compromised, and that this will be able to cascade into most of my major accounts being compromised. I do what I can to protect myself, but gmail as a single source of failure makes me nervous. Using any email provider besides gmail makes me even more nervous, because they don't have the full power and knowledge of Google protecting their databases.

Re: Finding vulnerable Twitter accounts with expired domains

#14

Even though they show the starred email address and one of the suggestions is not to show the email, I really hope people don't do that. There is nothing more frustrating when you're recovering your password and the site says we have sent you an email with no hint where and even worse sometimes they say "if that email was in our records then you should get the link" and you're wondering did that work and #1 worst is…

I don’t think you having to either A) remember what email you used or B) creating a new account is a big ask when the alternative is leaking your account presence on a given system. Not everyone wants other people to be able to essentially query a given app for an email account.

Re: Finding vulnerable Twitter accounts with expired domains

#15
post #12

At some point in time we decided that email addresses control the keys to the kingdom. If you lose access to your email, there goes your social media accounts, your bank accounts, your gaming accounts, and potentially many of your commercial accounts as well. And then we decided that custom domains are the most professional. Which does make sense, there can only be one 'robert@gmail.com'. But, this is coupled with th…

You point out some problems, but how do we actually do these?

Without emails as the keys to the kingdom, what would you use?

Without a global identifier for a human person (like social security in the US), how would we declare that an identity is compromised?

While I believe your ideals are well-intentioned, I think they're impractical in our current society.

I would propose that an email is the key to the kingdom, that people running custom domains and use them for email must deposit $500 in registration to do so (to ensure the domain is registered for their lifetime), and that they should be protected by a password plus 2FA with your phone being the other factor. And I propose that each person should be uniquely identifiable by an email address stored in a global publicly-accessible database.

Re: Finding vulnerable Twitter accounts with expired domains

#16
post #3

This was a common way to harvest 6-digit ICQ numbers back in the day. Hotmail, MSN etc. had expiring email addresses as well that you could register to reset the password to the ICQ number.

oh yeaahh I forgot about the travesty of expiring emails on free services.

Re: Finding vulnerable Twitter accounts with expired domains

#18
post #12

At some point in time we decided that email addresses control the keys to the kingdom. If you lose access to your email, there goes your social media accounts, your bank accounts, your gaming accounts, and potentially many of your commercial accounts as well. And then we decided that custom domains are the most professional. Which does make sense, there can only be one 'robert@gmail.com'. But, this is coupled with th…

CAEP provides this to some extent https://openid.net/wg/sse/ - but now you're asking for a whole bunch of systems to be able to talk about you in back channels which other people will find fault with.

Re: Finding vulnerable Twitter accounts with expired domains

#19
post #12

At some point in time we decided that email addresses control the keys to the kingdom. If you lose access to your email, there goes your social media accounts, your bank accounts, your gaming accounts, and potentially many of your commercial accounts as well. And then we decided that custom domains are the most professional. Which does make sense, there can only be one 'robert@gmail.com'. But, this is coupled with th…

You point out some problems, but how do we actually do these? Without emails as the keys to the kingdom, what would you use? Without a global identifier for a human person (like social security in the US), how would we declare that an identity is compromised? While I believe your ideals are well-intentioned, I think they're impractical in our current society. I would propose that an email is the key to the kingdom, t…

There's a difference between an email address and a social security number in a way that the latter will still be around if you stop paying for it or something happens to you. In some way (at least for this threat model) a gmail address is better than one on your own domain as it's unlikely to go away or get taken over.

Re: Finding vulnerable Twitter accounts with expired domains

#20
Anyone else have people sign up for accounts with your email address? I had one recently where I could access a working GrubHub account for a while. And in the spirit of lame on-boarding optimization and “churn” prevention, while I could have used it - I couldn’t cancel the account. That required the phone number associated.
Post reply on HN