Gaining Info On Tech Execs With Just Their Email

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."

Any way around this?

[jbuk]

Is there any alternative to throwing out a "this email address is already in use" error if a user attempts to register with someone else's email?

Hate using my Email address as log in

[Nyder]

Always thought it was a bad idea. I was helping a buddy of mine get some online game going, and the place (EA Games) wants your email address as your log in ID. But my buddy, is like, "why do they want my email's password?" I try to explain, "They don't. They want you to use your email as your log in info, but make a new password." I'm pretty sure he used the same password as his email password. And honestly, that is way too easy to do like that.

Re:Hate using my Email address as log in

[Cormacus]

Unfortunately a lot of the same sites where you would want to use this kind of information gathering (adding the "+thisSite" to your email address) refuse to validate email addresses with the '+' character. I've run into this in more than a few places.