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Hackers sell data of 130M Chinese hotel guests on dark web for 8 Bitcoin

thenextweb.com

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Re: Hackers sell data of 130M Chinese hotel guests on dark web for 8 Bitcoin

#3

Post by dis-sys »

For me, the shocking part is not that someone selling such private data online. The really scary thing is the fact that such a doggy company with no privacy & network security concepts whatsoever actually managed to collect private data from 130 million people in a few years.

btw, the database was not uploaded to github, some moronic programmer hard coded the url/username/password of their database into a source file and uploaded that to github. As expected, the database can easily be accessed from the internet and more than 100G of data was stolen without being noticed.

Re: Hackers sell data of 130M Chinese hotel guests on dark web for 8 Bitcoin

#4

Post by dis-sys »

djstein wrote: post #2

so something that happens everyday is news worthy why? because he undersold? or is this type of data so common that it was only worth 50k USD?

this dataset contains the unique national ID, home address, cell phone number, bank card number of 130 million Chinese. you also get to know the exact time and duration of who they shared a hotel room with. it is _not_ common.

Re: Hackers sell data of 130M Chinese hotel guests on dark web for 8 Bitcoin

#5

Post by fosco »

dis-sys wrote: post #3

For me, the shocking part is not that someone selling such private data online. The really scary thing is the fact that such a doggy company with no privacy & network security concepts whatsoever actually managed to collect private data from 130 million people in a few years. btw, the database was not uploaded to github, some moronic programmer hard coded the url/username/password of their database into a source file…

Agreed.

compared to exactis and and experian leaks though, I am wondering what makes this data valuable? (pardon my ignorance)

Edit: appears you answered in another thread.

> this dataset contains the unique national ID, home address, cell phone number, bank card number of 130 million Chinese. you also get to know who they shared a hotel room with. it is _not_ common.

Re: Hackers sell data of 130M Chinese hotel guests on dark web for 8 Bitcoin

#8

Post by rqs »

> The company's developers accidentally uploaded the entire database to Github

Wait, from what I've heard, the programmer just uploaded a configuration file that contains the password of the database?

And oh boy, he's not the only one, Maybe GitHub can do something about it.

To the topic: This is the exact reason why I don't support any sort of system that log users personal information without user's control.

Because regardless how strong and secure you think your system is, all it takes is one careless action, then everything blows up.

Re: Hackers sell data of 130M Chinese hotel guests on dark web for 8 Bitcoin

#10

Post by TeMPOraL »

dis-sys wrote: post #4
djstein wrote: post #2

so something that happens everyday is news worthy why? because he undersold? or is this type of data so common that it was only worth 50k USD?

this dataset contains the unique national ID, home address, cell phone number, bank card number of 130 million Chinese. you also get to know the exact time and duration of who they shared a hotel room with. it is _not_ common.

> you also get to know the exact time and duration of who they shared a hotel room with. it is _not_ common.

This is Ashley Madison territory. A goldmine for extortions.

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