4 ms·
as it's a tracking pixel it's personalized, if you are reading your email in the cafeteria with their wifi, potentially everybody in the cafeteria know more abo
by wolfi1 9mo ago
as it's a tracking pixel it's personalized, if you are reading your email in the cafeteria with their wifi, potentially everybody in the cafeteria know more about you than they need
- crazygringo 9mo agoWhat do you mean it's personalized? It's an anonymous identifier token specific only to that email. Like I said, even with HTTPS everyone in the cafeteria theoretically knows you're connecting to HBSC as well. So I don't see the difference.
- sharperguy 9mo agoThey know that you likely read some email from HSBC and if you happen to read the same one again they will know it was the same one.
- crazygringo 9mo agoRight. But even over HTTPS it's not rocket science to figure out that connecting to www.email1.hsbc.co.uk pretty strongly suggests you've opened an e-mail with an image. And the number of times you request the same URL tells someone... what exactly? Because HTTPS still tells people the number of times you access any URL on a domain.
- awesome_dude 9mo agoWorst case scenario is the HTTP pixel request tells attackers that there is a verification chat happening. HTTPS the attackers know a conversation is happening, but no idea what But, I personally think the threat is being overblown (I am happy to be corrected though)
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- majkinetor 9mo agoIts not only overblown, its totally non-issue. The main problem seems to be tracking pixel itself to deduce involvement. The suggested approach to send email to confirm email seem better, unless it contains link to login page (as it can be phished). So, the best seems to be that one should send email that explains user how to confirm e-mail by logging manually to the app.
- cryptonector 9mo agoYou _think_ it's anonymous.
- danaris 9mo agoWhat on earth makes you think it's anonymous? It's trivial to encode each tracking pixel with a personalized hash of some sort linking it to the intended recipient of that particular email. This is...just how tracking pixels work.
- crazygringo 9mo agoRight. The hash is anonymous to anyone without access to the internal database of hashes at HSBC. That's how tracking pixels usually work. Sniffing the HTTP connection isn't giving you any way to de-anonymize the recipient. It's a hash, not a long-term identifier.
- danaris 9mo agoBut if they're sniffing your wifi, they can, at the very least, tie it back to your IP address. Along with all the other traffic from your session—which, if you're not using a VPN (in which case they can't get this anyway), is likely to leak enough to provide several more points of identification.
- crazygringo 9mo agoWhich accomplishes what? The hash isn't used for anything else or tied to anything else publicly.
- danaris 9mo agoThey can see that someone opened a tracking pixel from $BANK (or wherever), and, with your other activity, potentially tie that to you.