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Hacker Breaches Securus, the Company That Helps Cops Track Phones Across the US (vice.com)
Securus, the company which tracks nearly any phone across the US for cops with minimal oversight, has been hacked, Motherboard reported Wednesday. From the report: The hacker has provided some of the stolen data to Motherboard, including usernames and poorly secured passwords for thousands of Securus' law enforcement customers. Although it's not clear how many of these customers are using Securus's phone geolocation service, the news still signals the incredibly lax security of a company that is granting law enforcement exceptional power to surveill individuals. "Location aggregators are -- from the point of view of adversarial intelligence agencies -- one of the juiciest hacking targets imaginable," Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, told Motherboard in an online chat.
But this latest data breach is not the only sign that Securus is careless with sensitive information. Rid pointed Motherboard to a Securus user manual available online. One part shows a map and user interface for a Securus product, but instead of populating the screen with fake data for demonstration purposes, the guide appears to include the real name, address, and phone number of a specific woman. (Motherboard confirmed the details with those in online databases, as well as a media report that mentions the woman).
How stunningly incompetent
Hope he left some Cryptolocker behind after siphoning their data and jerking their pants off in public. Between charging prison inmates exorbitant rates to call their families and giving anyone who asks cell phone location data (without verifying the veracity of a warrant), Securus is a truly predatory company. The US wouldn't lose anything if they went under tomorrow.
How does someone find out if they are in the list and being watched?
Paranoid
The list is of Securus' law enforcement customers, not individual citizens. And there is no "list of people being watched" here. The data is already being collected on everyone, it's just a matter of if a Securus customer made any requests about you. Without more info on how one uses the service, it's hard to tell if there is a record of who was tracked.
= Security + Circus