  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, Asia, Europe, and
Oceania. We conducted the first transcontinental analysis on the account
remediation protocols of popular websites. The analysis is based on 5 steps
websites need to provide advice for: compromise discovery, account recovery,
access limitation, service restoration, and prevention. We find that the lack
of advice prior work identified for websites from the U.S. also holds across
continents, with the presence ranging from 37% to 77% on average. Additionally,
we identified considerable differences when comparing countries and continents,
with countries in Africa and Oceania significantly more affected by the lack of
advice. To address this, we suggest providing publicly available and
easy-to-follow remediation advice for users and guidance for website providers
so they can provide all the necessary information.
