Website publishes passwords for Irish email accounts and bank accounts

Would it not make sense to publish the affected addresses somewhere? Otherwise, how do you know if you are on the list?
 
Brendan said:
I had it here but took it down when Blacknight accused me of "scaremongering".

It is back again now:

http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=112923
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It is scaremongering

My email address is on that list, so you want to state to the world that my email address was compromised?

Do you also want to say the same about every other email address on that list?


You also have no right to publish a lot of personal email addresses on a public website.
 
Have you ever heard about Spam robots collecting emials from forums? Have you ever heard about javascripts or other way of protectiong emails from spam-robot-collection? You can be sure that this list has been collected by may spam robots already. All those people will receive a lot of V-I-A-G-R-A email thanks to the list. Good job.
 
Good God, i just found the list and my password published on it in about 3 seconds.

Brendan would you mind please deleting that list from this site? It leaves people wide open to spam and hackers.

Thanks

MS
 
I think its a good thing to be able to check if your name is on that list, I support Brendan 100% in him putting that list up. Its there to be found.
 
MissSherry said:
However i don't think anyone should be rounding on Brendan. He provides a very decent site here and was only trying to help by publishing the list.
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That's not excuse for totally ignoring several things:


  • he claims the site listed email account details when it doesn't
  • he had no right to publish the emails
  • publishing the emails not only infringes people's privacy it also lets them be harvested by bots as already mentioned
  • his wild claims about email accounts being compromised borders on defamation for any IT professional whose email address is on the list
 
I concur that the list should not be listed on this (or indeed any) site. Publishing the list does not serve the effected individuals well - they may or may not look at this site to be informed and it re-publishes e-mail addresses that they may not desire to have in the public domain compounding the problem of the original site and the google cache thereof.
 
he claims the site listed email account details when it doesn't
yes it does. it might not contain your details, but it does contain others.

he had no right to publish the emails
Do you need a right to? you personally might not like it and can ask Brendan to take it down but Id be genuinely interested in seeing any legislation where someone needs authorisation to post (or not) an email address.

publishing the emails not only infringes people's privacy it also lets them be harvested by bots as already mentioned
I take the point of privacy but do you think your email wasnt going to harvested off that arabic site anyway? So you'll get 2-3 more spam mail messages on top of the other 100 a day. No biggie. Spam filter, bit of perspective here.

his wild claims about email accounts being compromised borders on defamation for any IT professional whose email address is on the list
you really should try some of those logins on the list. They do work you know, making the claims not wild. Maybe his assertions that emails have been compromised are incorrect in all cases, but private details somewhere have been compromised, else what else are the passwords for?


Harvesting is only one of the methods used by spammers to obtain e-mail addresses. Having your address listed on a public website has a negligible impact on the amount of spam you receive.
Yes, yes and yes. see my point above. couple more enhancement emails a day in your spam filter folder shouldnt make you change your email address.

I would really lay off Brendan on this one and be more concerned about what people are doing with logins and how hackers got their details in the first place.
 
Re: List of email accounts for which passwords have been made public

It Seems The Website which was hacked has addmitted responsibility: My address was on the list and I have just got this through from them:

[FONT=&quot]
It has come to our attention recently that one of our servers was hacked. A list of names, email addresses and passwords of our customers appeared on a hacker website on the internet. This account was one of those on the list. The website removed the page but a cached page was still available. Fortunately we do not hold credit card information on our servers, this is held by our credit card processing company. We suspect that this was a graffiti type attack. We have since introduced a more stringent password policy and passwords are now encrypted using the latest techniques. We want to sincerely apologise for any distress this may cause and want to reassure you that we will work hard to make sure this does not happen again. We recommend you login immediately and change your password to reduce the affect of the security breach.
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I agree that there are concerns about posting the list here, but I also think that there are benefits in having posted it. There would appear to be some, and perhaps many, accounts on the last whose password hasn't even been changed yet, so presumably there remain people affected who are still unaware of the issue. Closing this thread will not help them, given that the list (with passwords) is already in the public domain, whereas leaving the thread open has at least some chance of helping them.

One approach to mitigating some of the concerns about the list being posted here is to edit the list and remove the domain portion (everything after the "@") of each mail address. The remaining user portion is still enough to alert people whose e-mail address contains that user portion. The user portion is not unique, so this may alarm more people than those actually affected, but in the worst case this means that more people carefully review their mail account and change their password, which is good practice generally anyway.

As regards the suggestion that posting the list borders on defamation of IT professionals on it, this is a misguided view that just serves to reinforce the mistaken image that IT professionals are immune from these issues. The reality is that everyone is subject to hacks like this. Sure, with a bit of common sense and/or IT experience you can take steps to shield one online account from issues with another by keeping your multiple online identities separate, etc., but at the end of the day if you have an online account at all as either an IT illiterate user or as a highly experience IT security professional, you are at risk of the account being compromised in some way.
 
Re: List of email accounts for which passwords have been made public

Now that the company involved has emailed its customers, I have removed the list from public view.

Brendan
 
Thanks for publishing it Brendan, I was relieved to see my own wasn't on their but if it was, I woulda been thankful for you publishing it and bringing it to my attention.
 
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