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The exploitation and potential damage would be service specific. Say a Dropbox like service for computer file syncing: An attacker creates an account for 'alice@example.org' and gets the signup email automatically confirmed. The attacker uploads some malware files to the account. After some time Alice attempts to create a valid account and resets password for 'alice@example.com'. Then Alice installs a desktop file syncing client provided by the service and malware files from the attacker get downloaded to her machine.

Another example would be if a company hosted a web app for employees that allowed signups only from @company.com addresses. In such case an attacker could be able to signup with such an address.



You are right. I didn't think about 3rd parties creating accounts on a service they don't control.




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