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3 billion - we live in an age where half the population of the earth can exist on a service, and everyone is vulnerable. Yes, a good chunk of these are probabl
by kiernanmcgowan 9y ago
3 billion - we live in an age where half the population of the earth can exist on a service, and everyone is vulnerable.
Yes, a good chunk of these are probably duplicates for business / spam / anon accounts, but this is where the world is trending. How long is it until facebook or google have a massive breach?
- ktta 9y agoWell I would say close to half of those accounts are duplicate - as in not 1 account per person.
- jlgaddis 9y agoThe article mentions this: > The number of individuals affected by the 2013 attack is smaller than 3 billion, because some people have multiple accounts ...
- ktta 9y agoWell 'smaller' and 'close to 50%' will have different effects, and I'm willing to bet that the number of individuals affected will be a lot, lot less than 3bn.
- anonytrary 9y agoI would go further and say 3b is an order of magnitude too large. Bots aside, If there are only 3 accounts per user, our estimate is at 1b. Now, we take into account malicious agents like bots and spammers, easily carrying a bloat factor of 3-5. The closer estimation might be 100s of millions of unique human users, and maybe half of those users actually care. TLDR+Edit: Didn't see your other post and accidentally straw manned you. Anyway, I agree it's gonna be "a lot lot less" than 3b unique human accounts.
- craftyguy 9y agoIf that's the case, I think the bigger news then is that yahoo actually had 3B users!
- jsjohnst 9y agoNobody ever said they are active users or unique individuals. I know for example I personally created hundreds of accounts on Yahoo! over the years.
- dingdongding 9y agoHundreds? Are you sure?
- rm_-rf_slash 9y agoI know a guy who uses a service that creates a unique email account for every service he signs up for. That way, he tells me, if he ever gets any spam, he can delete the account and it doesn't affect any of his other email accounts.
- mschuster91 9y agoWith gmail, you don't need it - foo+bar@gmail.com will end up as foo@gmail.com and you can filter by To: header.
- magoon 9y agoSpammers will never find a way around this.
- cm2187 9y agoThis is pretty useless. First because it leaks the underlying email (you can safely assume all spammers are well aware of this feature). Second because if you start receiving spam, you can't stop it. All you can do is to try to deal with the firehose. A much better solution is randomly generated aliases that you can delete.
- maccard 9y agoAnd many places block email addresses with pluses in it - for example my insurance company
- chiefalchemist 9y agoI'm not being snarky, but do you think they would tell us if they did? We have to assume they are prime targets. They might have slightly better personnel, but is that enough to out do the nefarious and the determined? And can we discount a rouge employee?
- peterwwillis 9y agoThe NSA already breached both Google and Yahoo. I can't remember if they got Facebook too, but it wasn't that big back then.
- jsemrau 9y agoFor FB the breach might be the feature?
- wmeredith 9y agoSerious question: at what point do we reach the "everyone is vulnerable so no one is vulnerable"? EDIT: Or maybe not "no one is "vulnerable", but just that everyone's information is assumed compromised and our current societal infrastructure accounts for it.