Has there been a data breach?

[+milvus-milvus]

I have received a spam email addressed to milvus-milvus - a name I use only here on geocaching.com.  How did they get my geocaching userID and email address?  Has the website been hacked?

[+MartyBartfast]

12 minutes ago, milvus-milvus said:

How did they get my geocaching userID and email address?

By scraping the address book of anyone you've had an Email conversation with using that address....

 

[+on4bam]

I use unique email addresses for every contact (except friends/family) like hotel booking, flights, shops... and most of my addresses remain clean however, every once in a while I start getting spam send to an address that is used for just one contact, sometimes years ago. It looks like that hotel/shop/... had a virus or was hacked getting it's contactlist in the open. There's nothing you can do yourself to avoid  this. As for GC, your unique geocaching address is used with every email you have send via the "send email" to other cachers so you'll never know where it was leaked.

If GC's database is hacked and user data was leaked/stolen, they would have to inform us EU citizens of that fact to comply with GDPR. Given the huge fines for non-complying you can be sure your address was not leaked by GS but one of the people that got an email from your GC address has/had a virus/hack problem.

 

 

[+thomfre]

5 hours ago, on4bam said:

As for GC, your unique geocaching address is used with every email you have send via the "send email" to other cachers so you'll never know where it was leaked.

This is only partly true. You can avoid sending your email address by not checking the "I want to send my email address along with this message" check box.

[+on4bam]

1 minute ago, thomfre said:

This is only partly true. You can avoid sending your email address by not checking the "I want to send my email address along with this message" check box.

 

Correct, I did include that while I was typing but deleted it again.