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Experian, this less helpful than not knowing (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/assholedesign@lemmy.world
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[–] 17 points 2 years ago (1 child)

My email address is literally registered on dozens of websites. I use a different completely random password, generated by a password manager, on every one of those sites. How would I know which website and which password was compromised based on this message?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Here's a neat trick that works with some providers: you can include a + sign and an extra string of characters and it will still be delivered to the same address. Example:

    user083+some-online-shop@provider.net will receive the mail for user083@provider.net. So you can register with a different email address everywhere yet it all goes to the same account. If your account gets leaked or breached you'll know where it happened thanks to the extra information behind the +.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah I know about that trick. I’ve run into problems using that in the past because the + notation isn’t universally supported, and also some companies sell their customer lists to other companies. I forget the specific details because it happened years ago now, but I found one of my + addresses signed up to a mailing list I didn’t want to be on. The form used to unsubscribe from that list considered the + an invalid character, so I couldn’t unsubscribe. As I recall it took a week or so of emails to various contacts at that company to get me unsubscribed.

    Besides, it wouldn’t help at all in this particular case. Look at the screenshot. It’s redacting everything in the email address before the @, so I still wouldn’t know which one they are referring to.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah, the redacting is weird. How did you even receive this? I thought it came via email itself so you would know but it's still redacted in case you're using aliases. Or perhaps they assume people have only a single account with any provider and thus could infer.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I’ve had my identity stolen multiple times over the years and had everything from fraudulent tax returns filed to get refunds, to credit cards taken out in my name. I was one of the victims of the federal governments Office of Personnel Management data breach 10 years ago (think the HR department for the entire US Federal Government). That resulted in me getting what amounts to free ID/credit monitoring with a really good company for the rest of my life. They send me alerts similar to this one fairly often, and it’s also next to useless. My guess is it’s based on lists of usernames & passwords stolen from websites and offered for sale by scammers. It’s not uncommon for those types of lists to have been collected from multiple websites, and merged into one giant list since lots of people still use the same password everywhere. So there’s likely no way of knowing what website a given set of credentials came from.

    As for the masking of the email address, seeing that different monitoring services are doing the same exact thing it makes me wonder if either these are all coming from the same third party service, or if there’s some sort of law/regulation that is requiring them to mask it…

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    But they hide everything before the @ so how does that help?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    You can narrow it down by length. Not perfect but it's a start. Unless the *****s are always the same length like in some password fields. Hard to tell from the message.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    It's not a good method is it? It relies on others not being really stupid

    Oh hay Lets just make they reacted paid rise same length render tone, since that is real really easy.

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