I really wish they could check phone numbers. I've been getting a TON of spam recently and it would be interesting to see where it's coming from.
There has likely been an evolution of war dialers. It's probably easier to blast through every possible number once a year, and sell a list of every valid number. Targeting specific area codes is probably faster and would avoid some legal problems.
Huh. You think read receipts via RCS could make it worse? Obviously Google would probably have to make an exception to allow for this but hey "~~Don't Be Evil~~"
I have no idea, unfortunately. Tinkering with phones and ways to exploit messaging is something I haven't done in a number of years.
My first guess would be yes? If you ever get a blank email with only the subject line of "Hi", "Hello" or similar, it is simply a test to see if your email address is valid. It's not a stretch to assume there are also simple ways to verify valid numbers that can also recieve text messages.
This is a really dumb fix that I started using several months ago when I was getting 5 or 6 spam calls a day.
I would answer, and if they asked for my name or whoever lives at my address I would tell them they have the wrong number, I'm not them, I don't have a house, whatever. Anything to make them positively sure that the person they are looking for does not exist here. Within 1 week the calls dropped off significantly. Now, about 5 months later I get maybe one call per month.
You could in the past (until around 1-2 years ago). I don’t know why it changed, though.
I've gotten a lot less spam calls since I started using the Google assist call screener. I get legitimate calls that hang up because my idiot ops guys can't listen to the recording and say what they need to when they call me direct instead of my office redirect line, but it also seems to chase off the spammers if they know their AI has to get through my AI to even have a chance at trying to scam me, since I'm a harder target than average.
Yea just got the alert that one of my old email addresses was affected
Does that mean the malware was once on your system?
I doubt it. Probably just means some website i signed up to using that email was compromised and had all their data leaked.
The blog post regarding this "dump" suggests that it was actually from malware, so the answer to "Does that mean malware was once on your system?" is likely to be Yes. https://www.troyhunt.com/processing-23-billion-rows-of-alien-txtbase-stealer-logs/
my email has been in several breaches, for example trillian chat that i have never even heard of, and some virtual keyboard i definitely have not installed.....should i suspect malware?
Likely perhaps, but this email address hasn't been actively used by me in over a decade, which means either this dataset is extremely old, or maybe the holders of the data had been compromised by malware when they were attempting to gain access to whatever website. Who knows?
And since it was a singular address, and none of my other addresses were affected, im able to determine the timeline of when I was affected by this. Its during an era where this email address was involved with many data breaches.
There are 23 billion records in this stealer log, with only 284 million unique entries.
For stealerlogs yes, it means malware was on your system, and exfiltrated data, typically from your browsers.
I don't understand how to find out which specific sites had my data leaked. Without that I can't take any action. I'm subscribed to email alerts but the alert did not include any details like the article said it would.
Use the 'Notify me' option and verify your email address, and then it will show the expanded list of domains that were exposed from the malware:
Finally, a data breach that doesn't include me. Good to know I dodged it.
I found the stupid piece of malware that leaked my info.
TrojanDownloader:MSIL/FormBook.D!MTB
Installed alongside a pirated photo editing software back in 2021
I just always assume my info has been leaked and use randomly generated passwords and 2FA where possible as well as “not-real” security questions.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
