A Transcontinental Analysis of Account Remediation Protocols of Popular Websites
Philipp Markert, Andrick Adhikari, Sanchari Das

TL;DR
This study conducts a comprehensive analysis of account remediation protocols across 50 popular websites in 30 countries, revealing significant gaps in security advice and highlighting regional disparities in remediation support.
Contribution
First transcontinental analysis of account remediation procedures, identifying widespread deficiencies and regional differences in security advice across popular websites.
Findings
U.S. websites lack advice in 37-77% of cases
African and Oceanian websites are most affected by lack of advice
Significant regional disparities in remediation support
Abstract
Websites are used regularly in our day-today lives, yet research has shown that it is challenging for many users to use them securely, e.g., most prominently due to weak passwords through which they access their accounts. At the same time, many services employ low-security measures, making their users even more prone to account compromises with little to no means of remediating compromised accounts. Additionally, remediating compromised accounts requires users to complete a series of steps, ideally all provided and explained by the service. However, for U.S.-based websites, prior research has shown that the advice provided by many services is often incomplete. To further understand the underlying issue and its implications, this paper reports on a study that analyzes the account remediation procedure covering the 50 most popular websites in 30 countries, 6 each in Africa, the Americas,…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
