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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 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?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
So in order to find out if your personal information has been breached, you have to disclose said information AND pay a fee. Seems a little fishy to me. Isn't that how a lot of identity-theft scams operate in the first place? "Hey, your identity is at risk. Send us money and details and we'll check to see if you're a victim or not.........and.....YES...you are now a victim! Thank you for using Thieves-R-Us!"
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
... can I then sue him for illegally possessing my sensitive data?
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
He almost certainly obtained his information legally, but some or most of it came with strings attached, including prohibitions on any non-official or personal use.
I predict any attempt to monetize this by a private individual will be shot down fast.
It's one thing for a government to provide this service on a cost-recovery basis, under heavy regulation.
It's quite another for someone to collect this data under "official" or "can I have it as a favor" pretenses or even buy it on the "open market" but use the fact that you are in government to make people think you won't abuse it then turn around and sell the same information. Even if he's doing it on a cost-recovery basis, I don't see any regulation and it just looks bad.
What he should do:
Sort the data by country of residence or nationality, then give the data to those countries' governments or simply destroy it. If he asks nicely for donations and is clearly being good about the way he handles this, he might get enough to cover his costs.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
My name? It's Bill Gates. Oh, no, it's Warren Buffet .... Barak Obama.......
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It's far more brilliant.
You must give him some information about yourself to determine if you're in the database, non? Information that includes your credit card numbers, perhaps. Where do you think that data goes, I wonder.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
... he'd notify the relative banks and get them to issue new cards to the card holders and then cancel the old account numbers.
Or isn't that something a police officer would not do?
Aren't the police supposed to help protect the public?
Actually, under the Data Protection Act he isn't allowed to hold that database at all. This will end very badly for him.
I thought that you were allowed to obtain your credit REPORT for free once or twice a year. The credit SCORE is considered proprietary information and therefore subject to a fee. I think it's a load of crap. If there was justice in the world, ANY information that ANYBODY uses as part of a process to determine how they interact with and treat you, should be freely available to you.
I got mine stolen by using my teller card in a machine in Orange County California. I've never actually had it stolen on line. Always by physical means.
Why bother
I realize this is going by the wayside and all that, but doesn't anyone in the UK police service get ethics training anymore? Let alone have some type of psych eval when they join like they do in Canada? Some serious ethical questions that should be raised not only by his service, but also by the crown.
Regardless of whether or not he retired from being a police officer or not, there's some things that don't go away when you retire. He's crossed a line, whether he realizes it yet or not. Then again, this being the UK, maybe I shouldn't be surprised, if this is commonplace for retired officers to pull stuff like this, it could be an example of how deep the rot actually goes in their entire system.
Om, nomnomnom...
Actually in the US using police or federal services for personal use as an officer is a felony, thus if this guy was an American police officer he would be arrested and all his information would be confiscated as evidence for his trial.
Actually, the US can have him extradited and convicted even if he didn't commit any act on US soil. Just look what happened to the UK hacker that got extradited, and the fellows who were claiming political asylum in the US for something they did outside the US.
Endangering the economic well-being of americans will likely not go unpunished, especially if amongst those are lobbyists, military personnel, etc.