Recently I had to find out how to make myself private again in certain personal things, cause AI is just not giving up, so I have decided to bring this forward since it kind of worked for a couple of things. But it might not be permanent, although it might give you a bit more leeway to enjoy some temporary privacy in real life.
So...
Have you been haunted lately by tons of "password reset" requests that you don't ask, or 2FA requests that you never requested, constantly being requested by brute force attack bots?
Yes! 🤬
Yeah, I know, and with AI and agentic coding, these things are now programmed in seconds, and if discovered or torn down, they just re-appear somewhere else. It became impossible to deal with these in a human way.
So what solutions/tricks can we use for a better quality of life?
The "temporary" answer is Anonymisation
AI often relies on data to compare or identify, and of course, there are still attacks that use generation algos to brute force things, but most of the targeting will happen first on "known" things.
So, how can you anonymise something that's already known without having to move everything to a new account, etc... or in some cases, have to start from scratch.
And please note, this might not be possible in many places because the systems don't allow you to change certain things, but my aim is to simply explain the strategy.
I will use Microsoft accounts, for example, which is something I changed recently to this model, in order to explain the technique. Although this can be applied in different ways using slightly different methods.
The idea behind anonymisation?
Whenever you use your email on any service website, tool, etc, that email gets registered in a database. Then either when those websites get hacked and all your details get leaked, or when those places you use those credentials sell your data (almost everything), the details get known by bad actors.
These then use automated systems to collect more information and find out more about where and how you use your credentials. Instead of using credentials that personally identify something about you, these comparisons will start to get harder, and you will fall lower in priority as a target (note, it's still possible to find you, but it will be less probable, and you can also re-anonymise it again.
How to work with existing credentials?
You obviously can't just make your life horrible with multiple things of the sorts of, "[email protected]" account for your kids' school communication or a friend who wants to get in contact with you.
So, the idea is not to stop using your existing things, but instead to fool the open system that scans or stores these things for you into thinking you are something else, without any identifiable built-in information, making you more "invisible" for parsing or linking to other information methods.
The above example of the email account, where you just forward things from that account into your real email, and instead of providing your normal email account to your friend, you can now safely give him/her a QR code with the randomised email address.
Then, if that gets hacked, leaked, etc, you just create a new one and do the same thing again. Note, that this is not flawless, but adds a level of anonymisation that will help with the process.
PLEASE REMEMBER, you still need to make these other accounts secure, or not use them for certain security-sensitive things, like getting codes for logging in places, etc. Use a local password manager and/or another device to store secrets that recover your accounts.
The Microsoft account (for another example of this)
Even if you have 2FA or MFA on Microsoft, the moment your login (or email) gets leaked and known by these bots, you will start getting password resets and/or 2FA requests from time to time, if not constantly, until Microsoft detects and stops that... and in some cases they can't even, because the attackers use VPNs and keep rotating around the world.
And because Microsoft does not have geo-blocking (even if that would not prevent every attack, it reduces it quite substantially too), IP range blocking, or even whitelisting IPs capabilities that make these attacks much harder to execute, you are forced to use creativity in order to keep adapting to this world of automatic attacking.
So, in this case, the secret is to generate a randomised outlook or any other email address, like the one above, for example (please don't use it as it is not anonymous anymore).
Then follow the steps:
- Add that randomised email to your existing Microsoft account.
- Make the randomised email address the primary one.
- Deactivate any other emails or logins as much as possible to be used to log into Microsoft.
- Redirect everything from the new random email address into your normal one.
- If the account is not an Outlook account (otherwise you don't need this step, as it uses your existing thing on your Microsoft account, assuming you have them obviously, and you SHOULD), you need to set up MFA and security for that randomised account too.
Boom, now your "leaked" real email address can't log into your Microsoft account. You still get emails, and your account is still the same (and password), but because the random email address is not known, the attacks of "reset password" and 2FA requests from the middle of nowhere will stop.
This definitely requires a password manager, because otherwise you will get nuts! I would even advise two password managers if you have very important stuff, and a local (offline) thing to keep backups.
What if the random email gets leaked (eventually might, because brute-force attacks will go through every single possible email)? You change it again... Although I think it might take a little while, especially if you use very large email strings of +32 characters (max is 64).
And this is sort of the technique... 😎
Will not be the same everywhere, but hopefully you get the strategy.
And yes, takes your time, and we fricking hate it, but it adds a bit more quality of life to your peace of mind and day to day agility.
Note that you still need to be paying attention to hacking schemes, because nowadays with AI, things that previously were known as "not possible" or "hard to break" quickly change momentum and security posture.
That's it, hopefully this helps you think about how you build the security around you and your family. It's not going to be an age of easy life because of all this, and until stuff gets guardrailed.
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