I exported the emails of 15,512 cryptocurrency enthusiasts from slack
How I exported the emails of 15,512 cryptocurrency enthusiasts from slack.
Slack knows but it’s not their problem.Photo by Tom Sodoge on UnsplashThis was literally a three step process.The privacy of your data is highly dependant on the companies you trust. If they choose the wrong tool for the job your data becomes public. In this case 15 companies got it wrong. Choosing the wrong tool exposed the names, emails and timezones for their communities.During the crypto bull run of 2017 a lot of projects started to use Slack for their communities. To get an allocation of tokens you had to get on the whitelist. The first step was usually joining the community.Then the spear phishing scams came thick and fast. They where precisely timed and very convincing.Normal email scams have deliberate spelling errors as a self selection mechanism. Filtering people based on gullibility improves the return on time for scammers. The reason scammer don’t want everyone to reply is they have to interact with each potential victim. Unlike regular scams…