There has likely been an evolution of war dialers. It's probably easier to blast through every possible number once a year, and sell a list of every valid number. Targeting specific area codes is probably faster and would avoid some legal problems.

This is a really dumb fix that I started using several months ago when I was getting 5 or 6 spam calls a day.

I would answer, and if they asked for my name or whoever lives at my address I would tell them they have the wrong number, I'm not them, I don't have a house, whatever. Anything to make them positively sure that the person they are looking for does not exist here. Within 1 week the calls dropped off significantly. Now, about 5 months later I get maybe one call per month.

You could in the past (until around 1-2 years ago). I don’t know why it changed, though.

I've gotten a lot less spam calls since I started using the Google assist call screener. I get legitimate calls that hang up because my idiot ops guys can't listen to the recording and say what they need to when they call me direct instead of my office redirect line, but it also seems to chase off the spammers if they know their AI has to get through my AI to even have a chance at trying to scam me, since I'm a harder target than average.

Does that mean the malware was once on your system?

Its the opposite for me, first time I actually got caught in one.

Use the 'Notify me' option and verify your email address, and then it will show the expanded list of domains that were exposed from the malware:

Rent a domain Set up email Use a unique address for every website

I usually pick the domain of the website as the username part.

So if, say, I have email set up on lemmy.cafe and want to sign up to flatearth.com - I'd probably use flatearth.com@lemmy.cafe for an email address. If they ever leak it - I'll be reveiving spam sent to this address.

In the six years of hosting my own email I've only had one such occurence when namecheap got breached. It was nice being able to tell where the culprit was!

As another poster detailed, this is not a company that exposed your info: these credentials are all from stealer logs, which are logs of credentials stolen by keyloggers installed on machines. If your credentials were in this report, it means that you've entered that username and password on a machine with malware on it. Could be your personal machine, or it could be some other computer you've used.