granted, that reduces the risk of real sensitive information being attached to linked accounts, but i'd still not be surprised if there are some accounts attached to them elsewhere if they didn't get banned prior to receiving their first email.

i gotta admit i didn't read the source earlier though, and i agree with your points in general for bot accounts if they have been banned before being used.

Proton might recycle abandoned email addresses and the privacy risks are terrifying in c/privacy@programming.dev

[–] example@reddthat.com 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I'm sure proton would clear the inboxes before making the addresses available, so there's no risk of seeing legitimate mail meant for someone else.

this is just completely wrong. obviously Proton wouldn't grant access to existing mails, but the new owner of the address will still receive new emails intended for the previous owner. this is where the main risk lies.

there are most likely accounts with various services attached to these email addresses. you can discover some via data breaches, some via emails they send to you, and some you might discover via trial and error. it might even just be a service telling you that am account already exists when you try to sign up.

combine that with most services allowing account recovery by just using email, even for the services without publicly leaked passwords, you will be able to easily recover access to the accounts and in many cases get access to sensitive information.

0

Removal of some kbin.social communities (reddthat.com)

submitted 2 years ago by example@reddthat.com to c/reddthat@reddthat.com

1 comments fedilink

Hello Reddthat,

Similar to other Lemmy instances, we're facing significant amounts of spam originating from kbin.social users, mostly in kbin.social communities, or as kbin calls them, magazines.
Unfortunately, there are currently significant issues with the moderation of this spam. While removal of spam in communities on other Lemmy instances (usually) federates to us and cleans it up, removal of spam in kbin magazines, such as those on kbin.social, is not currently properly federated to Lemmy instances.

In the last couple days, we've received an increased number of reports of spam in kbin.social magazines, of which a good chunk had already been removed on kbin.social, but these removals never federated to us.
While these reports are typically handled in a timely manner by our Reddthat Admin Team, as reports are also sent to the reporter's instance admins, we've done a more in-depth review of content in these kbin.social magazines.
Just today, we've banned and removed content from more than 50 kbin.social users, who had posted spam to kbin.social magazines within the last month.

Several other larger Lemmy instances, such as lemmy.world, lemmy.zip, and programming.dev have already decided to remove selected kbin.social magazines from their instances to deal with this.

As we also don't want to exclude interactions with other kbin users, we decided to only remove selected kbin.social magazines from Reddthat, with the intention to restore them once federation works properly.
By only removing communities with elevated spam volumes, this will not affect interactions between Lemmy users and kbin users outside of kbin magazines. kbin users are still able to participate in Reddthat and other Lemmy communities.

For now, the following kbin magazines have been removed from Reddthat:

To get an idea of the spam to legitimate content ratio, here's some screenshots of posts sorted by New:

!fediverse@kbin.social

[

](https://scrot.de/img/M/e/hIpRDN7DbQ50S1ensKT1v4g1B.png)

!opensource@kbin.social

[

](https://scrot.de/img/E/g/mBmHFnkDd-I7RKotU-o0YBcji.png)

All the removed by mod posts mean that the content was removed by Reddthat admins, as the removals on kbin.social did not find their way to us.

If you encounter spam, please keep reporting it, so community mods and we admins can keep Reddthat clean.

If you're interested in the technical parts, you can find the associated kbin issue on Codeberg.

Regards,
example and the Reddthat Admin Team

TLDR

Due to spam and technical issues with the federation of spam removal from kbin, we've decided to remove selected kbin.social magazines (communities) until the situation improves.