Stop posting your emails on public forums!

I was browsing through a Telegram Channel dedicated to recruiting new trainees. There were around 10 posts in the channel and found roughly more than 10k comments. The part that caught my eyes? was there were a ton of email addresses, phone numbers with their names posted by “applicants”. So, I challenged myself if I can extract those email addresses.

I copied and pasted all the comments into a file since there were a few of them I didn’t need to write a spider to crawl and extract all those comments. After I copied and pasted all the comments I wrote a script to extract and save the emails into a file. The script was only 10 lines of python code. I was able to extract around 280 email addresses.

I am writing this to bring to your attention the danger of posting your email address and other sensitive information in such public forums. Doing such makes it easier for attackers to attack you, Spammers to flood your inbox with spam messages. Attackers send phishing content to your email that looks legit and asks you to enter your password or other credentials. To your surprise, many people click those fishy links, which leads to a data breach.

CISCO’s 2021 Cybersecurity threat trends report suggests that at least one person clicked a phishing link in around 86% of organizations. The company’s data suggests that phishing accounts for around 90% of data breaches.[tessian]

I suggest using multiple emails for multiple purposes. For example, you should use one email address for social media, forums, and public comments, a second email for family and friends, and a third email address for only work-related purposes. Use a temporary email provider like 10minutemail for sites you only need to access once.

If you are interested in reading more about this topic the following blogs have a lot to offer.

How to Identify Phishing Emails and Spare Your PC

Why shouldn’t I post my email address in a public forum?

Thanks for reading?

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More than 60 Telegram channels blocked in Germany – Gagnoncharlotte – Medium – Telegram Group

Connect to your Telegram Lamden account – Telegram Group

Telegram para tu negocio. Telegram tiene alrededor de 500… – Telegram Group

Telegram in Business: How to Use the Messenger to Increase Sales – Telegram Group

The art of indexing +1PB data on Telegram – Telegram Group