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Personal Data of a Billion Indians Sold Online For $8, Report Claims (theguardian.com)
Michael Safi, reporting for The Guardian: The personal information of more than a billion Indians stored in the world's largest biometric database can be bought online for less than $8, according to an investigation by an Indian newspaper. The reported breach is the latest in a series of alleged leaks from the Aadhaar database, which has been collecting the photographs, thumbprints, retina scans and other identifying details of every Indian citizen. The report in the Chandigarh-based Tribune newspaper claimed that software is also being sold online that can generate fake Aadhaar cards, an identity document that is required to access a growing number of government services including free meals and subsidised grain. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which administers the Aadhaar system, said it appeared the newspaper had accessed only limited details through a search facility that had been made available to government officials.
Thanks Intel.
I'm trying to understand the price/value issue in play here.
And I want a large Cherry Slurpee included as well.
This is a good example of what happens when you fail to invest in strong security. I'm not talking just about getting hacked, I'm also talking about employees walking off with your data and selling it. The ability to access this information should have been heavily scrutinized and limited. I'm guessing India had an amateur hour setup and has no way of tracking how this information was even taken.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Based on the purchase power parity calculation and using the McDonald Burger index, 8 USD works out to several billion Indian Rupees.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Unless, of course, you want to ship (more or less on time) a product that actually works, indeed, does anything at all besides print stack dumps. Meanwhile, you'll still be on the phone at 7:30 P.M. going "No, no, a hydrogen atom is one proton and one electron...".
Hello, my name is Sanjay and I am with the India State Tech Support Agency. I have received a notification from your computer that it has encountered a problem that needs to be fixed. If you will please give me your credit card information, I will help you fix your computer. Thank you for your cooperation and I'm sorry for the inconvenience this computer problem has caused you.
Seriously, it's about time the love got spread around to India to see how they like being scammed.
We'll make great pets
At least the Indians can't blame their security on the incompetence of IT outsourced to a foreign country with a reputation for substandard software...
So... there's absolutely no way this'll become political, right? I look forward to the calm and rational discussion that'll we'll be having here on Slashdot...
0.61, and 1.25 downs.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The real question we all want an answer to is how many Bothans died to bring us this $8 worth of information
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
It is really stupid to design a system that depends on "security through obscurity". A billion person database was unlikely to ever remain secure, since hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats need access to it everyday. So the security of the system should not have been designed on the assumption that any of that information is confidential.
Using biometric information is reasonable if it is done as an additional factor. It is not reasonable to rely on it as the only factor (except perhaps for very small transactions), and it is ever dumber to store the biometric data on the ID card itself, where it can be easily falsified.
The real story here is not "data breach" but "dumb design".
...that's about double their net worth anyway.
-Styopa
Welcome! Would you like a Mango Slurpee with that data?
...UBI should be a thing because the big data companies are making a killing off your data.
WTF does UBI have to do with "big data company" profits? They're not TOTALLY unrelated because they both involve money, but that's the end of the connection I see.
When your data is only worth $.00000008, how does one expect UBI to be feasible?
Because nobody's suggesting that we fund UBI with personal data sales. Are they?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
So, what's the largest data base that can be secured? 100 million entries? 10 million? 1 million? Maybe more like 10 entries? ... 5 entries? ... one?
If you're correct -- and for all I know, you are dead on -- it does not bode well for our shiny new digital universe.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
No, I mean you have to explain every fucking thing,usually from first principles.