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Ask HN: Any place to report compromised sites?
I sometimes receive spam to special email addresses that I only use at particular sites. For example, I just received one to an address I used only ever used to experiment with the game Town of Salem, years ago.
When this happens I assume that my address was sold, or the site was hacked. In either case it reflects badly. Is there a registry somewhere to collect sites that sell/leak email addresses?
Note that the above example is just one of many. I assume the ToS of some permit selling email addresses. In many cases, such as the RadioReference hack, this isn't the issue and should be made public.
- LinuxBender 6y agoThe site operator may not ever tell you if they were hacked, or sold your email in a dirty cross-marketing campaign. It is possible that the people you would report this to may not even know if they did this intentionally. If it was from a cross-marketing dirty list, only the web marketing people may know, if even then. In my opinion, just flag that address as spam and set a rule to either discard their emails or put it into a "compromised" folder. If you want to give the the benefit of doubt, then find the legal/security/report-fraud links on their site and let them know. Maybe you will get an authentic human response.