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.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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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.
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.
Another thing that helps is to answer and immediately mute your line so the caller only hears an empty line. Spam dialers hang up and eventually mark the number as invalid, and most people who are real callers will prompt with a hello or something. I did that for a while before I got the Google call screen, which cut it down even more.
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.
For stealerlogs yes, it means malware was on your system, and exfiltrated data, typically from your browsers.
I don't think that's guaranteed to be true.
A very old email of mine which I haven't used in many years was in the breach.
None of my other email addresses were in there, so it's highly unlikely that I was affected by this malware in the last decade.
That email has been in many other breaches however, so I wouldn't be surprised if somebody who had access to an old dump was infected.
My money's on some random skid who downloaded an old database dump and got infected when they downloaded some bad warez.
Either that, or this includes credentials from people who had the malware 15+ years ago.
Then they must have tried your password and saved it to one of a specific number of places. Infostealers are by definition a class of malware, which means it's got to be installed somewhere with access to the directory storing the credential.
Or it was from an old computer, or mislabeled.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3f9do5mtT8
Here's a good talk on infostealers for anyone curious.
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
Finally, a data breach that doesn't include me. Good to know I dodged it.
Its the opposite for me, first time I actually got caught in one.
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.
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.
Rent a domain Set up email Use a unique address for every website
I usually pick the domain of the website as the username part.
So if, say, I have email set up on lemmy.cafe and want to sign up to flatearth.com - I'd probably use flatearth.com@lemmy.cafe for an email address. If they ever leak it - I'll be reveiving spam sent to this address.
In the six years of hosting my own email I've only had one such occurence when namecheap got breached. It was nice being able to tell where the culprit was!
As another poster detailed, this is not a company that exposed your info: these credentials are all from stealer logs, which are logs of credentials stolen by keyloggers installed on machines. If your credentials were in this report, it means that you've entered that username and password on a machine with malware on it. Could be your personal machine, or it could be some other computer you've used.
That's true. My point was just that the important thing here is knowing personally which domains were affected so one can personally change those sets of credentials. If I don't know which of my credentials leaked then there's no value to me.
I was able to finally get access and did change the specific credential that had leaked (again, not assigning blame to any specific site here).
Just checked my emails and both were pwned. Bummer