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40 Million Identities Up For Sale On the Web
An anonymous reader writes "Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers, and even PINs are available to the highest bidder. The information being traded on the Web has been intercepted by a British company and collated into a single database for the first time. The Lucid Intelligence database contains the records of 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans; four million are Britons. Security experts described the database as the largest of its kind in the world. The database is in the hands of Colin Holder, a retired senior Metropolitan police officer who served on the fraud squad. He has collected the information over the past four years. His sources include law enforcement from around the world, such as British police and the FBI, anti-phishing and hacking campaigners, and members of the public. Mr. Holder said he has invested £160,000 in the venture so far. He plans to offset the cost by charging members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached."
He saved up?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The scary part I think is that he amassed this data for roughly 1/10 of a cent per person in there. Good thing the bad guys aren't doing this. Oh wait....
I have put together a database of upskirt photos collected from the internet. For a small fee you can peruse my collection and find out if you were a victim.
"He plans to offset the cost by charging members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached."
How, exactly, does this differ from extortion?
Because he wasn't the one who stole the information in the first place. He's merely offering a service to let you know if you've been the victim of a crime. This is very valuable information, as it could prompt you to cancel credit cards, or change PIN numbers. He had to incur some expenses to acquire this information so why should he give it away for free? The criminals are the ones that stole the information in the first place.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
If you're in the UK then as long as the data isn't held securely by him then yes. The UK's data protection act requires that all information that can be used to personally identify an individual is held securely.
If you're in the UK you can also use the Freedom of Information act to request any information he's holding about you, but for that he can charge a nominal fee, which is how he's probably planning on making the money invested back.
A former member of the metropolitan police and corrupt? Don't colour me surprised.
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
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Extortion is threatening to use the information against you or leaking it even more if you do not pay. The company is not doing this. The company is saying this is what I have come across during my travels... If you want to know what I know about you then pay up, you are not obligated to do so. Kind of like those for pay credit score reports. (I know you don't have to pay for the credit report.. but the credit score is a different matter.)
I am in no way defending the practice.
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
So if I buy some stolen goods from a thief and then sell that stuff back to the original owners, then I'm fine because I'm not the one who has stolen the stuff? I don't think so.
So why is this case different?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Because he wasn't the one who stole the information in the first place. He's merely offering a service to let you know if you've been the victim of a crime. This is very valuable information, as it could prompt you to cancel credit cards, or change PIN numbers. He had to incur some expenses to acquire this information so why should he give it away for free? The criminals are the ones that stole the information in the first place.
That depends on when he acquired it, and the resources he used. If he acquired it on the job, or using government equipment and/or connections, then it's the government's information and he doesn't have the right to sell it. If this was a "post-retirement" project he's been working on, then it would be legal.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Well then, I'd like it *back* please. I wasn't done using it yet. You can have it after I'm finished.
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If this was a "post-retirement" project he's been working on, then it would be legal.
No it wouldn't. This guy has no legal basis to acquire or retain this data, he's in very serious breach of the UK Data Protection Act.
Yes... but HOW, exactly, has he collected this information? It appears to be by using all sorts of connections all over the world, who are providing him with data and using the time and money of the State or Nation that employs them.
That has got to be a crime. It had damn well better be a crime.
Lets be fair, he's in possession of stolen property, and although he has turned himself into the authorities, the law applies to all criminals, no matter how they draw a pension. Perhaps the blokes that raid private events based on facebook tags should try the swat team or bomb squad and put a stop to extortion and misuse of public authority. Its looking like a gang related organized crime syndicate, or perhaps its all a coincidence or just an invitation for the blue hats to hack his target rich database. Good thing he's armed with a mace and a night stick. That way he can defend the 40 million people who he feels each owe him .000567 in order to recoup expenses for obtaining stolen ID's.
I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on the morality of this sale. Sales like these are completely non-unique, with one prominent example being the credit score business in the United States. As far as I know, Americans are only entitled to know their credit score for free twice a year, and no more. Additionally, lenders don't provide any fair warning that a person's credit score is at risk; in fact, younger credit card owners are encouraged to use their credit cards as primary spending sources with sign-up incentives and looser overall operating conditions.
Personally, I think that it's completely immoral to charge people for knowing whether their most treasured assets are at risk. Just don't let CNN know about it; I really don't want to deal with a full work day of them discussing privacy breaches, credit card fraud and how this all impacts Obama and Michael Jackson. (He's still dead.)
The pro-piracy folks around here say that copying isn't theft. I'd say that'd apply here too.
Not just the pro-piracy folks. Although I'd like to see reform, I am in favour of copyright. Incorrectly defining terms makes sensible discussion of a topic difficult or even impossible.
This topic doesn't inflame the argument so much because there is not a substantial portion of people who want "identity theft" to be legal. Since there is no debate on whether it should be allowed or not, using an incorrect term doesn't highjack the argument into being propaganda for one side. Theft and stealing are terms commonly used to describe things that are not in fact theft. That's usually ok, but when discussing proposed changes to laws that affect the whose society it isn't. For example, I would regard MPAA equating copying a movie with stealing a car, repetitively making that connection in the absence of opposing argument to the general population (on DVDs) as tainting the jury pool.
A teenage girl might accuse another of "stealing" her boyfriend. No problem, until you start proposing laws to have boyfriend thieves charged with theft. At that point, it would be necessary to point out the differences and that "stealing" is not really an appropriate term for what happened. That's where we are with copyright right now. In identity theft cases, I'm not sure there is a word to properly describe it yet. It is usually done in order to commit fraud, but the harvesting of the identity info is only the first step and probably isn't fraud in and of itself. Although fraud and theft are different, common usage of theft includes fraud, so theft is perhaps the best word to use right now even though it isn't exactly correct.
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More than a little fishy. I read this as, "British fraud officer leaves the force, collects the personal information of 40 million people from the black market and his buddies in law enforcement, and is now using it to make money. Oh, but it's not unethical this time because he used to be a policeman." If it was illegal for the phishers and fraudsters to have this ill-gained information, why is it not illegal for a former police officer to have it?
I know there are no privacy laws in Britain, but here in the U.S., I would hope that there's a law providing for the destruction of personal and/or financial details that were obtained illegally once they are no longer considered evidence in an ongoing prosecution.
The problem is that it's not very secure because there's a finite search space. If the database and system were illicitly copied, a dictionary attack (aka "preparing a rainbow table") would serve well to "unhash" most of the data in the database.
There are only 60 million Britons, and you can probably get or guess a good share of their names. Input them into the hashing routine, and you get a hash: let's say that "JOHN SMYTHE" hashes to "abc123". Next, you generate the 100 million possible taxpayer identification numbers, and hash those: "111-22-33-444" hashes to "def456". Once you've built the rainbow tables, if you look in the database and find a row with "abc123 def456", you know that JOHN SMYTHE's taxpayer number is 111-22-33-444. You know everybody's taxpayer number.
Salting the hashes makes the problem harder, but you can't salt an index value or it's unsearchable. So key columns are going to be unsalted. And what are likely to be the key columns? Name and TIN.
Hashing only secures data when there is an infinite set of probable values. There is not an infinite set of names or TINs.
John
Worse than that, isn't this just a big repository of valid identities, ripe for abuse by fraudsters?
"Hi, my buddies and I would like to pool the information we have to check to see if we're on your list. My name is Mr Adams, and my friends names are: Taylor, Brown, Davis, Evans, Wilson, Thomas, Johnson, Roberts, Robinson, Thompson, Wright, Walker, White, Edwards, Hughes, Green, Hall, Harris, Lucas, and Price. Take your time, we want you to be thorough."
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Peddling stolen goods back to the public, so is this what retire cops do when they can no longer serve and protect the public. I thought possessing stolen goods and profiting from it is illegal, so how the hell is this former cop think it is ok for him.