I’m very careful with privacy and security so I was surprised I got an obvious phishing email from “American Express”. I reported the email and moved on only to get another one today. I checked haveibeenpwned and it came back clear. I have never gotten a phishing email before the other day. As for the senders, they all came from generic IT sounding email addresses. They obviously weren’t American Express.
Some companies just blatantly sell your data. Others get breached and you are part of the package that gets sold by the hackers.
The only “way around” is to use unique mail addresses for each signup/company so you can easily lock it and switch to another one when it gets known.
Just assume, that everything that you type in a form online (or in any other way send to a company/another person digitally), every email you send, everything that gets digitized about you, etc. will be public one day. Either because the other side of the transaction sold it or because they (or you) will be hacked eventually.
Btw: HaveIBeenPwned does not necessarily contain all breaches. I have several notifications of companies that got breached and leaked my data that are not listed in HIBP…
Doesn’t matter how careful you are if the people close yo you with that information aren’t.
‘Why yes ofcourse you can access my address book in order for me to play candy crush.’
A few months ago was the largest data breach possibly ever. Something like 300GB of personal information. Basically everyone in the US. They have everything on everyone and it’s being passed all around on the dark web like skittles. The mainstream media didn’t cover this for whatever reason.
Could I get some sauce?
Look up “National Private Data Breach”. You’ll find a bunch of articles on it. Although someone else posted a newer one that I haven’t heard about so maybe that one’s worse. I would highly suggest that everyone put a freeze on your credit until you need to apply for something. Lots of identify theft happening since this occured.
Gotta love the compilation releases. By their very nature, they will always have the next largest with even the smallest breach being added.
“My neighbor Jerry wrote his password on a post-it note and stuck it to his monitor that I can see through the window. Let me just add it to the database…”
LARGEST PASSWORD LEAK EVER RELEASED BY BOB SMITH OF 123 MAPLE ST!!!
employees of companies with whom you’ve registered that email id sell it for some quick cash on the side.
i can aver this confidently since i know someone from dominos pizza has leaked my email id. i have a convoluted gmail id which i use to register to all these services and – because it’s gmail – i can set up random dots and a custom phrase behind a + to register specific variants to specific companies (e.g., abcxyz123@gmail vs. ab.c.xyz123+dominos@gmail).
all the spam and pseudo-phishing email is sent only to the variant which i’ve registered to dominos and not to a different variant (e.g., a.bcxyz123+bankname@gmail) registered to any other company.
the leaked email id doesn’t contain a name and is too random for it to just be “guessed” by the spammers.
Someone who you’ve corresponded with over email had their address book compromised and it was used in a mass phishing email campaign. It’s not necessarily targeted at you. I actually have experience of this happening. I had an email address that I used only to correspond to a single person. I never gave the email to anyone else and never signed up for anything. Well that person’s email was compromised and I started getting spam/phishing emails shortly after that.
This is gonna sound silly but check here:
Might have some info if you’ve had creds leak or get exposed somewhere.
Nvm, just re-read your post and saw you already did. Leaving this up for the link for others. Sorry to bother!
I’ve used that website in the past with no problem but a heads up I had to turn on js and off antifingerprinting to get it to load this time. For all those more security conscious than I
It works fine for me in Librewolf and Mull. What browser are you using? Just curious.
Firefox for Android. Wouldn’t load the list of beaches for me until I turned off shelter. Just kept reloading whatever frame is beneath the text input.
Have you given your email address to any other people you know? If so they probably put it into their contacts. They then use apps like whatsapp, insta, snap, etc which request access to their contacts. These companies then sell that information to ad companies. Tadaaa.
Honestly, no. Not that I know anyone who I’d want to have my email. I see your point though.
One possibility is that you have a fairly common username part and a similarly common domain like, say, gmail.
There’s nothing stopping a spammer from taking existing addresses and word lists, then taking them apart and putting them together in different ways to make up completely new addresses to send spam to. It doesn’t matter if 99% of the addresses they make up don’t exist because they’re only interested in the 1% of the 1% of successes who will fall for their scam. They don’t even get the rejections because the From address is usually bogus too.
e.g. I bet whoever owns john dot smith at gmail gets a huge amount of spam whether he’s in any databases or not.
Probably a breach that’s not on have I been pwned yet.
bummer
deleted by creator
So does Tuta which I currently use. It’s funny one of my aliases was in a breach recently.
When I sign up somewhere, I often use
my.emailaddress+service@gmail.com
And then occasionally spam comes into my mailbox “hi person, you singed up for spam service” send to my.emailaddress+spotify@gmail.com
and well, now I know who sold it
also also, type your email into haveibeenpwnd.com to find if it’s leaked somewhere
