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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."
I'll take one. I've been meaning to get a life.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Hello. My name is Mr. Burns. I believe you have some info for me.
Ok Mr. Burns, what's your first name?
I... don't know....
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
"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..."
He's got backers, I think. Al Queda is a possibility, but I suspect it's actually SPECTRE.
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
~John Lenno
No, we did. We being British tax payers, of which I am one, who are currently funding his pension. We're also funding the British police too, mentioned in the article as one of his sources. It follows then that we funded his career in the Met as well.
And now the git wants us to pay for stolen information, obtained from publicly funded sources utilising his publicly funded connections to acquire. Whatever his previous achievements in the Met may or may not have been, now he is simply a slimy scammer trading in stolen goods. The man is a disgrace.
Cheers,
Ian
I have put together a database of upskirt photos collected from the internet. For a small fee and a reference upskirt picture you can peruse my collection and find out if you were a victim.
fixed that for you
It's easy to access. All you have to do is email him your name and credit card info and ... ... wait a minute.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
... 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?
Well I'll be, its Scotland Yard and a squad of SAS coming for tea and biscuts! What? They say they're not visiting for tea and biscuts?
Actually, under the Data Protection Act he isn't allowed to hold that database at all. This will end very badly for him.
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.
My name? It's ... Barak Obama.......
And what is your date and place of birth?
= = = =
(Moderators: Google "Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories".)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Like ... actually having the information in the first place without permission of the owners of the data. The only legal thing he can do with it is destroy it.
I certainly have not authorized him to use my information.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Go to Google (or Yahoo or Bing) and type in your full social security number. Hit ENTER. If you find your number online, you're a victim of identity theft! If you don't find your number online...just wait a few days as you just sent it clear-text for the whole world to see. Yeeeeehah!
mu
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.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
I know there are no privacy laws in Britain
Erm... Yes, there are.
If this is what it appears to be, it's a fairly obvious breach of the Data Protection Acts. Indeed, from the TFA:
The Information Commissioner, the data protection watchdog, is monitoring the development of the database. [...] The legality of the database could be put to the test in the coming week. The Information Commissioner's Office said it could not endorse a commercial service or make a ruling on its validity unless someone made a complaint. But the privacy watchdog said it had "provided advice to help the company comply with the principles of the Data Protection Act".
I rather suspect that this advice may have been "Stop. Now." :-)
The database might also fall foul of European human rights legislation that explicitly covers privacy.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
This will end very badly for him.
Yes because here in the UK we always punish our criminally inclined police . . .