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Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

wsj.com

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Re: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

#51

Post by cm2187 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #44
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a guy who uses a service that creates a unique email account for every service he signs up for. That way, he tells me, if he ever gets any spam, he can delete the account and it doesn't affect any of his other email accounts.

With gmail, you don't need it - foo+bar@gmail.com will end up as foo@gmail.com and you can filter by To: header.

This is pretty useless.

First because it leaks the underlying email (you can safely assume all spammers are well aware of this feature).

Second because if you start receiving spam, you can't stop it. All you can do is to try to deal with the firehose.

A much better solution is randomly generated aliases that you can delete.

Re: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

#52

Post by maccard »

mschuster91 wrote: post #44
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a guy who uses a service that creates a unique email account for every service he signs up for. That way, he tells me, if he ever gets any spam, he can delete the account and it doesn't affect any of his other email accounts.

With gmail, you don't need it - foo+bar@gmail.com will end up as foo@gmail.com and you can filter by To: header.

And many places block email addresses with pluses in it - for example my insurance company

Re: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

#53

Post by dstaten »

mattbeckman wrote: post #31
orangepenguin wrote: post #27

I feel a little sad that pay-walled articles make it to the top of HN. I'm sure the article is interesting, but a lot of us can't actually read it.

Here's a bookmarklet I use sometimes: javascript:window.location.href='https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

not working for me, unfortunately

Re: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

#54

Post by odammit »

mschuster91 wrote: post #44
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a guy who uses a service that creates a unique email account for every service he signs up for. That way, he tells me, if he ever gets any spam, he can delete the account and it doesn't affect any of his other email accounts.

With gmail, you don't need it - foo+bar@gmail.com will end up as foo@gmail.com and you can filter by To: header.

I’ve run a fair amount of email campaigns where we strip out the + if gmail is the domain to ensure it doesn’t end up in some weird filter.

Dick move, I know. Tell marketing that though.

I personally use gmail through a vanity domain and have a catch all rule, so I end up signing up with a fake email account for every domain (hn@mydomain.com) and then the catch all forwards it to my real account (me@mydomain.com).

Re: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

#55

Post by shallot_router »

kakaorka wrote: post #34
devy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I doubt Yahoo! has 9 billion user accounts.

I never expected it to have 3 billion in the first place :)

I'm not too surprised at the 3 billion. I'm just wondering how many of those correspond to real people.

Re: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

#57

Post by cortesoft »

mschuster91 wrote: post #44
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a guy who uses a service that creates a unique email account for every service he signs up for. That way, he tells me, if he ever gets any spam, he can delete the account and it doesn't affect any of his other email accounts.

With gmail, you don't need it - foo+bar@gmail.com will end up as foo@gmail.com and you can filter by To: header.

Yeah, you do realize spammers know that, too? They will just strip part after the +

Re: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

#58

Post by BOBOTWINSTON »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #41
jsjohnst wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody ever said they are active users or unique individuals. I know for example I personally created hundreds of accounts on Yahoo! over the years.

Why make hundreds of accounts?

To troll hundreds of different niche internet groups of course.

Re: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

#59

Post by shallot_router »

ProAm wrote: post #12
hendersoon wrote: post #5

To put this number in perspective, there are ~7.5 billion humans currently living on the earth.

Wait for the day that Facebook is hacked.

I'd be pretty surprised if an attacker could actually get away with a lot of sensitive, actionable bulk user data from Facebook. DMs would probably be way too big in total, unless they just looked for DMs of high-profile people.

As for passwords, they're probably not stored in a very crackable format (probably some kind of super-bcrypt-esque algorithm with a pepper). Of course, they could hijack the login procedure and harvest passwords in real-time until they're detected. That would still be really bad depending on how long they can evade detection - maybe millions of passwords - but at least it wouldn't be retroactive. And the password dump could still be bad for people looking to target individuals within the dump.

Maybe advertising data could be trimmed down enough to dump the whole thing? Every ad that accounts have clicked?

Re: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

#60

Post by lttlrck »

mschuster91 wrote: post #44
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a guy who uses a service that creates a unique email account for every service he signs up for. That way, he tells me, if he ever gets any spam, he can delete the account and it doesn't affect any of his other email accounts.

With gmail, you don't need it - foo+bar@gmail.com will end up as foo@gmail.com and you can filter by To: header.

It also works with foo.bar which is a little harder to filter.
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