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Latvian "Robin Hood" Hacker Leaks Bank Details
eldavojohn writes "Move over Russell Crowe, an anonymous hacker in Latvia is being hailed as a real life modern Robin Hood. The hacker refers to himself as 'Neo,' claims allegiance with the Fourth Awakening People's Army, and is outing banks that are capitalizing off of the horrible economic status Latvia is currently suffering from. No word on how he is acquiring the information but it is slowly being leaked to TV sources via Twitter and the common people love him. The hacker is thought to be based in Britain but a TV reporter pointed out the fine line Neo is walking, 'On the one hand of course he has stolen confidential data ... and he actually has committed a crime. But at the same time there is value for the public in the sense that now a lot of information gets disclosed and the whole system maybe becomes a little more transparent.' An example of a juicy tidbit he revealed is that managers of a Latvian bank did not take the salary cuts they promised they would after the government bailed them out of economic trouble. You can imagine that taxpayers were upset and thankful they knew this information."
Million Reasons Why Latvia Is The Best Country In The World
Be warned, you'll lose productivity for rest of the day.
i saw a guy walking down the street just today - in a long black coat wearing sunglasses talking on his nokia. i thought "i bet that guys a leet hacker" probably him. he was scowling.
Ok. Clearly the fact that the pay cuts for the executives didn't occur is something that this individual should have leaked and was the right thing to do. ( Why didn't the government insist on minimal transparency about the salaries in the first place? Because apparently corruption and lobbying is the same everywhere). Frankly, in TFA I don't see any information listed that shouldn't have become public. It doesn't look like they leaked anything that allowed people to take money from accounts or to steal identities or to create damage to the banks' computer networks. If there's any indication that Neo has done anything bad (other than choosing a really pretentious and unoriginal alias) I don't see it in TFA.
stole from the government and gave to the overtaxed. This guy is copying from the government and pasting to the people. He's more like a "Neo the Document Liberator?"
FAP Army.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
I don't know anything about Latvia. Here in the U.S., though, you don't fuck with the big banks. They have money and power--which they will throw at your political opponents if you become too much of a "problem."
From the article I just linked to:
Balanced and centrist? I guess that just about sums it up.
If the First, Second and Third Awakening People's Army didn't rattle enough cages effectively, what makes them think the Fourth will prevail?
He's playing Robin Hood in a new movie that's not out yet.
I think calling the guy a hacker is a bit over the top. Basically what he did was change the document id numbers in the URL. The information he was accessing was not secured in any sensible way: the login page could be bypassed by simply entering an address by hand. It's pretty much an epic fail of the company that made the system (unless the flaw was introduced intentionally for some reason). Source: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.diena.lv%2Flat%2Fpolitics%2Fhot%2Fneo-no-4ata-mes-bijam-parsteigti-ka-mums-tik-ilgi-lava-datus-kopet&sl=auto&tl=en
"The nation's security council discussed the breach and expressed concern that only 50 percent of the country's 175 state-run data systems have security oversight. President Valdis Zatlers called for immediate action to install proper security on all systems. Computer experts concluded that the breach did not constitute a cyber-attack and was the result of poorly developed software and systems management." http://www.kansascity.com/2010/02/24/1770170/cyber-whistleblower-stuns-latvia.html I'd hate to be that CIO.
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
The summary is completely wrong. The actual history in short is as follows: Latvian Neo claims that the anonymous group 4ATA has downloaded about 7.4 million tax statements from the Latvian tax authority website that is used by businesses to submit their tax declarations electronically. It was done over 3 months period before the IT department realized that something is wrong. The stolen data includes practically full information about salaries and payments received by employees of all Latvian public and private enterprises.
4ATA is now periodically releasing the detailed pay information of certain public companies one at a time. He is careful to remove actual names of employees and for many this data seems trivial. But with this he is trying to prove that the claimed austerity measures undertaken by the government to fight the economic crisis is a big lie. However, the periodic release is annoying politicians who can't find a way to stop this leak.
As for Neo walking the fine line, he downloaded the data without circumventing any security measures as he claims that the website was open to everyone. The hole was one specific URL normally used by an authorized user to review his own statements. Each document in the total database is assigned an ID number and by sequentially changing the ID number in the said URL, everyone could download the whole database as no authorization was checked by the script on the server. After some time the tax department notice irregularities and noticed the developer of the system but they were rather slow to fix the breach. When they finally managed to get the act together, Neo had already downloaded about 98% of the database.