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Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online

arstechnica.com

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Re: Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online

#81

So what of importance is in their database that one could not find by otherwise searching the web? From the email i received from patreon i reckon the only actual private thing is the exact sum i pay to who. Some find addresses to be private, but at-least in my case any one can find where i live by looking on the local yellow pages website.

Some GamerGate supporters have made claims that video game reviewers have covered games and develelopers that they have backed financially through Patreon without disclosing this to their audience.

This disclosuee would allow those making that claim to demonstrate if their claims are accurate, and it allows those about whom the claim is made to demonstrate that the claim is inaccurate.

Re: Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online

#82

That's pretty devastating to anybody who gave up their data to support things they enjoy. I would really like to see services getting hit with massive fines so they actually "take security very seriously" before they get owned. It's far too late to care about it now, there's a lot of compromising data in that leak.

I'm not sure how compromising the data is... if you're referring to the display of what people support, that's public information. For instance here's my user profile. https://www.patreon.com/user?u=632496&pat=1 you can find it with one targeted google search

Re: Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online

#83
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So content creators should use PayPal then for donations? That's also a centralized service. How do you propose a transaction takes place without a service to process the details?

Bitcoin would be the obvious choice.

That would require a big change to the Bitcoin algorithms, wouldn't it?

Those are too many transactions with too little face value.

Re: Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you distinguish someone who was lax with their security from someone who actually takes it seriously and still got hacked?

You can't :) There is a huge Market for Lemons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons ) style scenario in IT systems with relation to security. Everyone will say "we take security seriously", but there's no way for ordinary consumers (or indeed most companies) to determine what the company meant by their statement, and to evaluate the relative security of the systems of two companies. This could actual…

I love that phrase, it so aptly describes lots of markets (e.g. data vis/big data systems). Thanks for the link!

Re: Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online

#86
This just got me thinking, which would be worse -- your account data from any one site leaked, or metadata about your internet activities leaked? Thinking about the arguments about mass data collection and metadata, I'm pretty certain I'd be most worried about metadata. Do metadata-collecting companies tend to be more secure, or more security aware, or it just hasn't happened yet?

What I mean is, if your private browsing session from your laptop, along with non-private sessions, and data connections for IM conversations, were all leaked, that would be intensely revealing.

Re: Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online

#87
post #32

There is a lot we can do as programmers to make data leaks of that scope a lot harder to pull off. I think web apps of a certain magnitude should not be talking directly to the database, they should be talking to their internal data API that resides on a different server. The reason for this is that a completely separate data layer is easier to lock down, and also way easier to monitor for unusual activity. Ideally,…

I think your intentions are in the right place but I don't think that would have helped here - they didn't just get in via SQL injection, they have all the source code too. That hints that they had quite a lot of access.

Based on what we know about breaches in general, it's quite likely the attackers were inside the network undetected for months: https://blog.code42.com/the-heavy-cost-of-ignoring-dwell-tim...

This would be plenty of time to slowly spread through the network, learn what is stored where, and hop through servers until they got what they need - even in a setup like the one you describe.

Re: Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online

#88
post #30

The centralisation of services like this has to stop. Why should giving money to creators be a centralised thing (many to many) instead of just a one to many relationship between the creator and their fans?

Because this makes it easy for non-web-savvy creators to get paid, at regular intervals. It establishes trust & familiarity for the users giving money. It's also a good way to minimize transaction fees if you're supporting many creators - from what I remember Patreon batches many small donations into one large transaction.

Re: Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online

#90
All the data breaches lately have demonstrated the need for some kind of professional engineering license to ensure compliance with best practices. Even if your app is meaningless in and of itself, a data breach can reveal Personally Identifying Information or credentials for other sites and accounts.

There's too much of a "code cowboy" mentality out there right now. As a community we've become very feature-driven and security is usually the last consideration. You need somebody whose name goes on the dotted line and assumes responsibility for the overall integrity of the system, because otherwise it's always Somebody Else's Problem. If you get breached and you weren't following best practices, then your PE takes on the liability, just like a building collapse or something.

This can be accomplished without significant burden to smalltime admins now that we have stuff like AWS and Docker. You should be able to Chef yourself a secure AWS instance and then Docker-Compose yourself a functional application deployment. Most smalltime users probably want some combination of CMS, storefront, or forum, and it should be pretty easy to provide these as prefabs. Some customization will be necessary, but then it will fall on the appdevs to force validation and security on the webdevs. If your defaults let someone inject SQL or something then it falls on the appdev, if the webdev uses an "unsafe" flag and overrides the defaults it rolls downhill onto the webdev. If you don't follow unit/integration testing best-practices, then it falls on you. If you don't pin your versions and a vulnerability opens up in the future - falls on you. Etc.

These standards should apply whenever you are a commercial entity or store Personally Identifying Information. If you are a legit smalltime user and don't want to use professionally licensed software then go ahead and do whatever, but you should be content with storing a username/password and perhaps using a one-time SMS or email validation that doesn't get stored. These then travel in a "viral" fashion like copyleft - if you are building a commercial website you need to do it using a storefront that has a licensed PE, that runs on a runtime that has a licensed PE. Once these are commonly available then most users would probably follow suit anyway.

This idea isn't going to be very popular with startup coders from Silicon Valley, but the reality is that the US is way out there on this stuff and we're seeing an epidemic of data breaches as a result. The EU has much more stringent data privacy laws. These don't have a whole lot of teeth at the moment, but the principles are down on paper and this is what I think you would need to implement them effectively.

To me HTML code is really a microcosm of the problem. People will write whatever old crap for as long as you let them get away with it. You have to make it as easy as possible to do the right thing, but a lot of people will have to be dragged kicking and screaming by turning on XHTML and disallowing standards non-compliance. Professional licensing is how you do that for applications and systems engineering.

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