Many years ago, during the very early days of the Internet, I made an e-mail address where I’d use that address for all my commercial and retail dealing. Things like when you have to make an account for home insurance, pizza delivery, hotel bookings, flights, content entries, e-commerce, essentially anything not to do with personal correspondence.
As you might imagine, as the online world grew, this e-mail address got used a lot. Through no fault of my own, the systems that this e-mail address were used on got hacked. I think MGM Resorts leaked my info in at least two in separate hacks. LifeLabs also made sure hackers knew this e-mail address.
Through a bit of luck and maybe some online smarts, hackers, to my knowledge, have not been able to get into the e-mail account. They sure have tried though. Once my info was leaked, I noticed the activity logs of my e-mail account began to spike and have never gone down. Every day for years now, the logs show people are trying to sign into that account and failing. On average, someone tries to sign into that account once per hour. I can also see where the sign attempts come from and they try from all over the world. So on an average day, 24 or so attempts are made to get into the account, every single day of the year.
Of course, I’m not stupid, I have alternative methods of account verification turned on. So even if they do brute force the password, they have a second wall to get around. In recent days though, I have been thinking about making that e-mail account passwordless, meaning it cannot be accessed via a regular password. Instead, you can use an authenticator app, a biometric key, or other ways to prove who you are. In all those cases, only the person who really owns that account can verify who they are because a hacker, for example, doesn’t have my fingerprints.
This is probably the smart thing to do because it seems like people will never stop trying to access this account. Every single night, while I sleep, 7 or 8 attempts are made to get in. If they do, they’ll be able to order as many Pizza Hut deep dish pizzas as they want.