The problem with having my first initial and last name as my email address is that I get a lot of email from other people. The other day, I started getting messages from SpeedDate.com. Not wanting to keep Barry from true love, I looked for a support address. There wasn’t one, so I tried going to the site by clicking the link. Imagine my surprise when I had full access to Barry’s profile.

Since I was in a good mood, I didn’t pretend to be Barry. I simply deactivated his account so that maybe he’d notice. The next day, I got another email saying a woman was interested in me Barry. Once again, I clicked the link to take me to the site. This time, I unchecked all of the notification options and put in a unused email address. I was interested to see what I could do if I were a bad person, so I looked at Barry’s profile information. He didn’t have much filled out, but he had his date of birth and his ZIP code. From which, I could use an online phone book to find his address and phone number.

That’s plenty of information for a social engineering attack. Considering he couldn’t enter his email address correctly, I’m willing to bet that if I called pretending to be from his bank, library, local police, etc. that I could get even more information out of him. Identity theft city, folks. It’s lucky for Barry that I’m generally a nice guy. Though it’s not really Barry’s fault that SpeedDate.com is stupid enough to allow unauthenticated access to user settings. I’ve tried to contact SpeedDate.com and have not yet received a response, so I’m opting to shame them publicly.

But ladies, if you’re looking for Barry, he’s not here.