Use the “passwords” feature to check if one of yours is compromised. If it shows up, never ever reuse those credentials. They’ll be baked into thousands of botnets etc. and be forevermore part of automated break-in attempts until one randomly succeeds.
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Protip for the room: Use a password manager with a unique password for every service. Then when one leaks, it only affects that singular service, not large swaths of your digital life.
Don’t forget unique email addresses. I’ve had two spam emails in the last 6 months, I could trace them to exactly which company I gave that email address to (one data breach, one I’m pretty sure was the company selling my data). I can block those addresses and move on with my life.
My old email address from before I started doing this still receives 10+ spam emails a day.
I’ve started using {emailaddress}+{sitename}@gmail.com i.e. myemail+xyzCompany@gmail.com
That way I can at least see who sold my info. I wish I would have started doing this long ago though. Some sites dont let you use the plus symbol even though it’s valid though
This trick is common enough and trivial to reverse engineer. I can just purge my billion-email-address hacked list of all characters between a + and an @ and have a clean list that untraceable with your system.
Right? Has this ever worked for anyone? I’ve never bothered because of how easy it is for spammers to bypass.
Spammers go for the easiest targets. If you do stuff like this, they might redesign their system to make it LESS likely to send to you. Keep in mind theyre targetting the elederly, mentally handicapped, and the emotionally desperate. They specifically DO NOT want to target the educated, technologically literate, and those that will waste their time. By attempting to technologically limit them from their scams, you make it more difficult for them to target you and it makes it obvious theyre not worth your time.
Its not about making yourself scam proof, its about making yourself an unappealing target.
(This all applies to scam emails, dunno if it has any effect if the goal is phishing but i would imagine so. If they can phish 5 people in the time it takes to phish you, youre no longer their target.)
Edit: this is why scam emails look obviously scammy, with misspelled words and grammarical errors. Its not a mistake, its an attempt to preemptively weed out people who want to waste their time
This is why my password is hunter2, no one can see what is says under the asterix,
For me, if this happens, it has no impact since almost every page i sign up to has a unique password. The most important ones has mfa as well.
Use a password manager. Simple.
Same, but I do have some level of worry regarding portability. My solution isn’t local or self hosted, as I was looking for easy and works across Linux/Windows/Mac/Android/iOS. I do not look forward to needing to change to a new password manager in the future, but given the way everything seems to be going it seems likely that I’ll have to at some point.
It takes a little more effort to setup, but the alternative to syncing a local keystore db like KeePassXC would be vaultwarden, which is a self hosted open source Bitwarden server that gives you all the features of Bitwarden and has full compatibility with all the clients.
Spinning it up is actually very easy, you just have to decide if you want to integrate SSL via a reverse proxy setup or just use the builtin webserver for HTTPS.
