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The best way to do that? Delete any unused account. “One of the main strategies that I use to keep myself safe is to limit the number of things I need to pay attention to,” Guido says.
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“If you're using an old email account as a password reset mechanism for your primary email address, that becomes the weak link, and suddenly there’s a backdoor.”
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“Where it starts to get really problematic is when accounts overlap,” Guido says. The attacker can also use the email account itself to impersonate you online. By snooping through your inbox, it’s easy to find other services you’ve signed up for using that email address, reset those passwords, and take control. When an email account falls into the wrong hands, it can be used to break into your other services and leave you open to identity theft or other problems. “If it's an older email account, you may not have touched since before you got into a good security habits, like using a password manager,” says Dan Guido, founder of the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits.Īnd when something goes wrong, you may not notice until it’s too late, a problem that affected many Yahoo users in 2016 when the email provider experienced a breach of over a billion accounts.
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This kind of exposure can happen on any account, but dormant accounts are often more vulnerable because they get less of your attention as time goes by. These techniques are cheap and efficient, Gendre says, and “we’re seeing it more and more.” In addition to the immediate problem of giving up access to an account, you're subject to the same risk from password stuffing. A hacker may also get to passwords through a phishing scam, where a fraudulent message tricks you into giving up a password for an email or a banking account.
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