BT Email users hit by barrage of unsolicited password reset PINs
A third said the number had passed 500, and another claimed to have received more than 1,000. It isn’t yet clear whether it’s the result of someone deliberately hammering a password recovery mechanism, a fault within BT's systems, or something else entirely. The Register has asked BT how many customers are affected, whether the messages are being generated by external password-reset attempts, and whether it has found any evidence of malicious activity.
- ▪A third said the number had passed 500, and another claimed to have received more than 1,000.
- ▪It isn’t yet clear whether it’s the result of someone deliberately hammering a password recovery mechanism, a fault within BT's systems, or something else entirely.
- ▪The Register has asked BT how many customers are affected, whether the messages are being generated by external password-reset attempts, and whether it has found any evidence of malicious activity.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/09/16/bt-email-users-hit-by-barrage-of-unsolicited-password-reset-pins/5296616 |
| Publication time | Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:15:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T09:18:41.755Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-16T09:18:41.755Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 7aBKIe0fBzll · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); NETWORKS BT Email users hit by barrage of unsolicited password reset PINs Telco says accounts are secure as customers report hundreds of mystery codes arriving in rapid bursts Carly Page Carly Page Published wed 16 Sep 2026 // 10:15 UTC READ MORE BT and Verizon spin off international networking arms into $4B joint venture June 29, 2026 Ofcom sees no need for overhaul in next phase of fiber rollout despite BT domination March 17, 2026 MoJ puts Prisoner Telephony Service replacement on…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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