Noah3
Junior Member
- Feb 20, 2022
- 138
- 102
A few weeks ago, I bought an expired domain and stumbled upon a major security flaw. While browsing the old site on Wayback Machine, I noticed it had an email like [email protected]. Since I now own the domain, I decided to recreate the email address.
To my surprise, I immediately started receiving emails from services like PayPal, WordPress, and others website linked to that email. This meant I could’ve easily reset passwords and taken over those accounts. I didn’t, of course, because it’s illegal and my name is tied to the domain registry, but the realization was terrifying.
This experience shows how dangerous it is to use your business domain for email accounts. If your domain expires and someone else buys it, they can recreate your old email addresses and gain access to everything tied to them.
How to Protect Yourself:
To my surprise, I immediately started receiving emails from services like PayPal, WordPress, and others website linked to that email. This meant I could’ve easily reset passwords and taken over those accounts. I didn’t, of course, because it’s illegal and my name is tied to the domain registry, but the realization was terrifying.
This experience shows how dangerous it is to use your business domain for email accounts. If your domain expires and someone else buys it, they can recreate your old email addresses and gain access to everything tied to them.
How to Protect Yourself:
- Avoid using your main domain for third-party accounts, use a separate email domain or service.
- Keep track of your domain’s renewal dates to prevent expiration.
- Always enable two-factor authentication (2FA) to add an extra layer of security.
- I mean how crazy would it be if one of those expired business emails in 2012-2009 owned some 1000+ bitcoins on coinbase and still had them on the websites and lost them when they lost access to their expired domain or when they died or whatever. I'm just kidding but that's not impossible tho ... ahahhah
