Selling access to hacked streaming accounts is big business during the pandemic, so if you make the mistake of reusing passwords it may eventually come back to haunt you.
While streaming video services have enjoyed a boom during lockdown, so have people who sell stolen passwords.
The black market is thriving, with an audit of the dark web last year revealing 15 billion stolen logins obtained from 100,000 data breaches.
You’re the one paying for your streaming subscriptions, but you might not be the only one watching.
Even if your own security is up to scratch, your streaming accounts are still at risk if you’ve made the mistake of using the same password on different services.
When a new user profile ‘Eve’ first appeared on the home screen of my Stan account (owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead), I wasn’t worried. I’ll confess that I’ve shared my account with elderly relatives to help them pass the time during Melbourne’s lockdown, so I figured they’d decided to make themselves at home.
A quick phone call revealed that the mystery Eve was not someone I know, so I decided to dig a little deeper.
Checking the list of devices which had recently accessed my account, I discovered a smart TV located in Sydney. Trawling through Eve’s viewing history, she’d only started watching a few weeks earlier; just as Sydney had gone into lockdown.
My hospitality only extends so far, even during a global pandemic, so I decided to show Eve the door. From the Stan menus, I went to the account management settings and clicked ‘Log out of all devices’. Then I changed my password so she couldn’t get back in.
The big question was, how had Eve accessed my account? And why was she bold enough to bring attention to herself, rather than just lurking in the background using my user profile?