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Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

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Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#231
It should be illegal for any company to store my private information like this. The 'anonymous' sharing of my information is easily de-anonymized. Sites asking for your phone number for "security purposes" are a joke.

You just have to accept that absolutely everything you've done online is public information. If it isn't now, it is being stored and future tools / databases will make what is either difficult to access or difficult to interpret very easy to use in the future.

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#232

I think the solution here is laws which require anonymity, and that includes in banking (where it will never happen). That is because a couple days ago, I got a text message from tmobile (which seemed genuine) basically saying that my account was one of a larger subset of prepaid phone accounts which had been compromised and that my personal information had been potentially taken by "hackers". To which I got a good c…

Do you think it’s reasonable to believe your name / address / SSN / DOB / etc is already out there?

I’m of the opinion it’s too late for prevention and we need, instead, mitigation.

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#233
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using ES off and on since before 1.0 came out. It has always baffled me that ES doesn't require a username and password by default. ES is a database that has to exist on a network to be usable. Heck, it expects that you have multiple nodes, and will complain if you don't. So one of the first things you do is expose it to the network so you can use it. Yes, it takes some serious incompetence to not realize y…

It has to exist on a private network behind a firewall with ports open to application servers and other es nodes only. Running things on a public ip address is a choice that should not be taken lightly. Clustering over the public internet is not a thing with Elasticsearch (or similar products). If you are running mysql or postgres on a public ip address it would be equally stupid and irresponsible regardless of the u…

So, after some thought, here's why I don't consider it pointless to have basic auth built in.

It would keep ES from being completely open. If you wanted to get in, you'd have to comprise some part of the network that would let you read the username and password.

The way it is now, anyone can do a scan for port 9200 and get full access right away.

It is also important to have a username and password, even on secured networks. My test instance is on an internal network, and protected by both network and host firewalls, but I still make sure to secure it beyond that.

Basic auth would not provide a false sense of security. It is simply a very basic part of overall security. Not having it is a mistake.

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#234
> Analysis of the “Oxy” database revealed an almost complete scrape of LinkedIn data, including recruiter information.

"Oxy" most likely stands for Oxylabs[1], a data mining service by Tesonet[2], which is a parent company of NordVPN.

It is probably safe to assume, that LinkedIn was scraped using a residential proxy network, since Oxylabs offers "32M+ 100% anonymous proxies from all around the globe with zero IP blocking".

[1] https://oxylabs.io/

[2] https://litigation.maxval-ip.com/Litigation/DetailView?CaseI...

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#235

I was at an Elasticsearch meetup yesterday where we had a good laugh about several similar scandals in Germany recently involving completely unprotected Elasticsearch running on a public IP address without a firewall (e.g. https://www.golem.de/news/elasticsearch-datenleak-bei-conrad... , in German). This beats any of that. Out of the box it does not even bind to a public internet address. Somebody configured this to…

ES's practice of making its security a proprietary paid for product is the cause for these kinds of things. It's a shitty practice, and this is one of the reasons I'm glad AWS forked it.

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#236

I think the solution here is laws which require anonymity, and that includes in banking (where it will never happen). That is because a couple days ago, I got a text message from tmobile (which seemed genuine) basically saying that my account was one of a larger subset of prepaid phone accounts which had been compromised and that my personal information had been potentially taken by "hackers". To which I got a good c…

Do you think it’s reasonable to believe your name / address / SSN / DOB / etc is already out there? I’m of the opinion it’s too late for prevention and we need, instead, mitigation.

Exactly. The very reason for existence of the two companies, pdl and oxy, is to tie n pieces of data with m pieces of data.

So depending on how the "anonymous" phone number was used, it's plausible that the number can be connected with other PII.

In fact I wonder if there is any such thing as non-PII, given the existence of such companies.

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#237
post #234

> Analysis of the “Oxy” database revealed an almost complete scrape of LinkedIn data, including recruiter information. "Oxy" most likely stands for Oxylabs[1], a data mining service by Tesonet[2], which is a parent company of NordVPN. It is probably safe to assume, that LinkedIn was scraped using a residential proxy network, since Oxylabs offers "32M+ 100% anonymous proxies from all around the globe with zero IP bloc…

How is that possible? LinkedIn blocked mining the data this way several years ago.

Is it still possible if you pay LinkedIn enough? Or is this old data?

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reported an issue to the LinkedIn competitor https://about.me two years ago where signing in with my Google credentials gives me access to some the account of some random other person with a similar name to me. I think that during registration, I attempted to register about.me/johnradio (except it's not "johnradio"), but he was already using it, and then the bug occurred that gave me this access. I randomly check e…

My gmail is my first initial followed by my last name. There are other people on this planet with same first initial and last name, some of whom seem to think that must be their email too, because I keep on getting emails where they used it to sign up for things.

Even more baffling are the ones who use it to fill out job applications.

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#239
post #230
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've crawled a popular social network on a large scale, currently doing the same for dating services as a hobby. God, wish I'd still got paid for webscraping. Here are some tricks which may or may not work today: - Have an app where user logs in through said website, then scrape their friends using this user's token. That way you get exponential leverage on the number of API calls you can make, with just a handful of…

> Have an app where user logs in through said website, then scrape their friends using this user's token. That's some extremely shady thing to do.

Welcome to the internet!

Re: Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

#240
post #234

> Analysis of the “Oxy” database revealed an almost complete scrape of LinkedIn data, including recruiter information. "Oxy" most likely stands for Oxylabs[1], a data mining service by Tesonet[2], which is a parent company of NordVPN. It is probably safe to assume, that LinkedIn was scraped using a residential proxy network, since Oxylabs offers "32M+ 100% anonymous proxies from all around the globe with zero IP bloc…

How is that possible? LinkedIn blocked mining the data this way several years ago. Is it still possible if you pay LinkedIn enough? Or is this old data?

A large number residential proxies and fake LinkedIn accounts would look the same to LinkedIn as normal browsing.
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