Gaining Info On Tech Execs With Just Their Email 75
jfruh writes "Did you know that Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has a loyalty points account with the Starwood hotel chain? Did you know that both Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer have Dropbox accounts? All this information — and much more — can be found out because so many prominent executives use their corporate email address for their account logins, and most sites make it possible to see if an email address is associated with an account even if you don't have the account password. Just knowing that such an account exists can lead to technical and social engineering attempts to crack it, as happened in the case of Wired's Mat Honan."
Re:Hate using my Email address as log in (Score:5, Informative)
This is where services like Mailinator [mailinator.com] are invaluable. Just create a throwaway email address for each of all these stupid logins.
I take it a step, further, though: I own my own domain and have made it a practice of using a custom email address for each site I need to log in to, i.e. sitename@mydomain.com . This way, each login is unique *and* I can track who is giving out my email address as spam.
Yet the emails all go to one central inbox, so it's not inconvenient to get/search the confirmation messages.
Re:Use a virtual email address (Score:3, Informative)
+notation is not a virtual email address. It's good that gmail follows the RFC.