Slashdot Mirror
Massive Porn Buyer Info Leak
Anonymous Guy wrote to mention a Wired article that covers the release of information for millions of customers onto the Internet. From the article: "The stolen data, examined by Wired News, includes names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses and internet IP addresses. Other fields in the compromised databases appear to be logins and passwords, credit-card types and purchase amounts, but credit-card numbers are not included. The breach has broad privacy implications for the victims. Until it was brought low by legal and financial difficulties, iBill was a top credit-card processor for adult entertainment websites."
It's not surprising someone other than MasterCard actually had a list of card numbers stolen. I have customers all the time tell me how they don't like what they feel are draconian measures to protect the credit card numbers people have in their own systems. What they fail to understand is that Visa and Mastercard require us to do this, and the protections we have are customer service.
But they still complain, because their customers and they themselves don't ever notice. Hell at one point I was told by a demanding customer to remove the protections because he said "I'll risk it." I was tempted to show him how insecure he was by remotely accessing his system, getting his list of customer phone numbers, and telling all his customers that he was careless with credit card numbers and their numbers could have easily been stolen from his system.
People are pretty careless about credit card security. It's usually in the name of convenience and visible customer service. Credit card security is invisible service. Being able to purchase something conveniently flies right in the face of having security which just might prevent you from selling something to someone, so some people don't care, as long as they are selling. Owners care once they find out that they'll be issued chargebacks, but individual salesreps will write down every credit card number on a piece of paper if it means making money for them personally.
Visa and Mastercard have the right idea, and in the press release I like how they said that they gave cardsystems a "limited amount of time" to basically get their act together so this doesn't happen again. Education and enforcement of regulations... nice to see an organization, especially one that is a corporation, actually give a damn.
Funny sigs make your Karma go down.
If you care to read more about iBill, you can check out their blog on G Spot. I didn't link the blog because it's not about the company; it's about trading buyers across all of its customer sites.
I wonder if this is a case of the company selling anything they could to escape dire financial straights or if it is the case of a disgruntled underpaid employee indulging.
Am I surprised such a shady company had its user's credit card info traded on the black market? Gosh, not really.
My work here is dung.
After all, free, as in beer, porn, means never have to worry having identity stolen or saying sorry to wife.
Plus, given the bottoming out production costs, we can easily produce porn of the same quality as closed source porn.
"Massive Porn Buyer Info Leak?" What the hell does that even mean? Hats off to Zonk for managing to use "porn", "leak", and "massive" all in the same headline and posting it to one of the most widely read sites on the net. That sound you hear is thousands of RSS feed subscribers all scratching their heads.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
A sudden surge in the filing of divorces is plaguing thousands of local communities...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
They didn't do credit card processing for midget-granny-and-horse-porn.com did they?
I mean, not that it would matter to me if they did...I'm just curious.
It was the other Chester J. Winthrop-Montague III!
Now if they leak the hardon pill database I'm screwed...
Man, you really need that seminar!
Internet IP addresses?
Well, as long as they didn't get their PIN numbers.
You can BUY porn? News to me.
CUSTOMER
--------
Bill O'Reilly
bill@billoreilly.com
WEBSITES
--------
falafelpron.com
hotfalafels.com
teenfalafel.com
Wait...did I just type that out loud?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
If we used a decentralized, anonymous digital cash system, these kinds of problems would be much less common. Furthermore, the responsibility would lie in your own hands rather than in the hands of thousands of unidentifiable people at some corporation.
I suppose it's wishful thinking, though, because everybody wants to be the central financial gateway (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, etc.) and governments prefer being able to track all transactions (toll booth transponders, bankers reporting all transactions over $10,000, etc.).
In January of last year, iBill was purchased by Interactive Brand Development for $23.5 million. On Monday, IBD's stock closed at 8 cents a share in over-the-counter trading.
8 cents a share? Nowhere to go but up! Time to call my broker*.
At the very least, their certificate will look good on the wall, next to the one from Enron. Maybe really good -- or really bad -- depending on which of their subsidiaries did the artwork. According to the Yahoo Finance link, "IBD also owns a library of original cartoon cel art (including He-Man, She-Ra, and Flash Gordon) [and] a 35% stake in Penthouse publisher Penthouse Media Group."
*Disclaimer: I don't have a broker.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Woohoo! Free porn for everyone!
I suggest that the open-porn should be stored on "Freshmeat".
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Last month, Sunbelt Software found an additional list of slightly over 1 million individual entries labeled Ibill_1m.txt on a spamming website. That list appeared to date from 2003.
Hmm.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Ibill_1m.txt Thaaaat doesn't look good.
What kind of moron buys porn? Hello? IT'S FREE ON TEH INTARWEBS, and especially on Usenet. There are people who literally get off on making and distributing porn of all varieties at no cost. They want you to watch.
Unless your idea of hotness is overproduced Playboy-style photography with a combination of four different skin textures, three different lighting rigs, and sixteeen different gauze filters, you can get what you want on Usenet without risking your credit history.
.....as if millions of computer geeks had cried out, and then became silent.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
grep -i 'senator' iBill.dat; grep -i 'representative' iBill.dat ; grep -i 'congress' iBill.dat
--
make install -not war
After all, the article said that no pieces of information were stolen that required them (by law) to inform their customers. Pretty convenient, eh?
I also noticed that they're from Deerfield Beach, Florida. Now, something odd about Deerfield Beach is its location. It's on the coast of Florida there. That unmarked island on the east side of the map? That would be Grand Bahama. Care to take a guess at what country it lies in?
So my guess is that the company did this legally and by choice. They probably found some bum on the street who didn't ask questions and would like to recieve a paycheck. He's probably also the president of the company with very limited responsibilities and capabilities. They're also probably prepared to give him a briefcase full of $100,000 and a boat to take to Freeport. And also some cute documents for him to sign that might as well say that he shot JFK.
Meanwhile, all the workers and people profiting off the deal claim they had no knowledge.
My work here is dung.
I could swear that's the name of some Thai porn star.
Anyone know if this guy is a known spammer? He's now upgraded to trafficking in stolen property.
http://www.whois.net/whois.cgi2?d=5sec.us
(sorry, lameness filter is being lame, here's just the basics badly formatted)
Registrant Name Sean Rogers
Registrant Organization Sean Rogers
Registrant Address1 1275 Falkland Rd
Registrant City Jacksonville
Registrant State/Province FL
Registrant Postal Code 32221
Registrant Country United States
Registrant Country Code US
Registrant Phone Number +95.486824101
Registrant Email gsmmax@mail.ru
What we need is for the name of some elected official(s) to be found in the data.
Then we'll see swift lawmaking action to clamp down on leaks of personal information by merchants and money-handlers.
So even those who give a f*ck, who bend over backwards for their customers, who do all that is humanly possible, don't get security right. ;-)
They can lick my balls for all I care.
They might take you upon that offer for their new Computer Geeks Gone Wild series.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
If ever a story qualified as, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." -- this is it.
If we used a decentralized, anonymous digital cash system, these kinds of problems would be much less common ... I suppose it's wishful thinking ... governments prefer being able to track all transactions.
Exactly. You are more likely to see secure computers and honest people than anonymous digital transactions. Governments won't allow it. And no you do not have a US Constitutional right, quite the contrary, the US government has the Constitutional power to create currency, collect taxes, define felonies (say money laundering) and pass enacting legislation, etc.
You can actually download this 214mb list of information here:
http://5sec.us/Ibill_1m.txt
I don't know why you'd want it, maybe you can use the passwords or something. But there it is anyway.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Livejournal, for example, was offering payment through iBill during the time covered by the leak (run that link through Archive.org if you care to verify, /. filters the part following the asterisk).
"The stolen data, examined by Wired News, includes names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses and internet IP addresses."
So it included the internet internet protocol addresses? I keep my internet IP address next to my PIN number at the ATM machine.