Walmart online customers have been receiving unsolicited messages from the company containing links to recover their account passwords. However, it doesn’t appear to be a phishing scam, but hackers may be attempting to validate email addresses for a possible future attack. There is speculation that they are using the system find out if the email addresses are associated to a Walmart account.
The Walmart system confirms or denies if there is an account linked to a particular email address. Therefore, it is a useful tool for hackers to validate information they acquire from the Dark Web or via other breaches. It also illustrates how using an email address as an account login ID can be dangerous.
If given the choice to use a separate login ID or your email address, choose to use a separate ID. Also remember to use different passwords for each online account. Password reuse is blamed for unauthorized account access often these days. Recent examples are Pandora, Spotify, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.
If you receive an unsolicited password reset message from Walmart or any company, don’t click any links that may be inside it. Instead, go to your account by typing the address into the browser or by using a previously bookmarked safe link. When typing any address, be careful not to make typos. Typosquatting (or do-jacking) is becoming more common. Cyber criminals will purposely register mistyped URLs of well-known websites in hopes that users will “fat-finger” the addresses and get to their sites instead. Once there a number of unpleasant things can happen such as malware getting downloaded to your device.
A Walmart spokesperson said there has indeed been an increase in password resets lately, but there is no evidence that their systems have been breached.
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