Read a post from a former hacker who said most breaches start with old email accounts

I used to think my passwords were strong enough and that was the main thing to worry about. Then I read this breakdown from a guy who used to do penetration testing for banks. He said the first thing they check is old accounts tied to an email address, the ones you forgot about from 10 years ago. I went through my email and found an old forum account from 2007 that used the same password as my bank. Changed everything that day. Has anyone else gone back and cleaned up old accounts?

2 comments

2 Comments

brian_rivera591mo ago

Man that 2007 forum account hit close to home. Found MySpace and some random gaming site from 2008 using the same old password I thought was clever. Deleted everything, changed every login that touched that email. Wild how something you forgot about can wreck everything years later.

xena11mo ago

You hit on something important there. It really is the accounts we forgot about that come back to bite us. I spent an entire weekend last year digging through old email inboxes and found accounts on sites I didn't even remember signing up for. The scary part is how many of those old sites have been sold or changed hands over the years, so your data might be sitting on a server nobody is watching. Good on you for taking the time to clean it all up, most people never think to do that.