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Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

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Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#291

Post by zrobotics »

judemelancon wrote: post #276
SoftTalker wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also physical markers in the ground at the corners of most properties. So if you had to, you could send a surveyor out to recertify boundaries. That would get very expensive quickly, however.

This is not true anywhere I've lived, and I'm curious where it is true.

I'm not aware of corner markers being the standard, at least in the central and western US. For rural and undeveloped land, oftentimes you can pay the surveyor extra to put up corner markers though, which is a good investment if you plan on fencing the property

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#292

Post by bluGill »

gowld wrote: post #284
skinfaxi wrote: post #5

> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…

In the US, real estate purchases come with "title insurance", because there is no official, guaranteed, land registry database.

That depends on the state, some do have a registry.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#293

Post by greycol »

olau wrote: post #270
iepathos wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the people who sign sworn affidavits already have to have proven identities? If so, then they're unable to recover from a situation where they lost everyone's identity.

You start with the queen. Everyone knows who she is.

While in jest, It does remind me of the time Dolly Parton entered a Dolly Parton look alike contest and lost.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#294

Post by dgellow »

dmos62 wrote: post #65
alexpotato wrote: post #37

Romanian friends have told me that this is really due to corruption. Specifically: - government gives IT/data contracts to cronies - cronies don't actually do any real security work to protect the data - things like this happen

Same thing is rampant in other Eastern European countries as well. Tips on how to address this for those of us that are publicly minded?

Look at what the new Hungary PM is doing

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#295

Post by Lerc »

alexpotato wrote: post #230
franciscop wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened in a 50k people town where my father is from in 1982 with a BIG flood that destroyed the town land registry documents (among a lot of the town). Since he's a lawyer, had first hand experience and I was always curious I asked many things about this a while back. Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people. You can never get to 100% recovery like…

> Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people In a similar vein, I was once curious how you would prove your identity if ALL of your relevant documents (passport, driver's license, birth certificate etc) were lost in some kind of cataclysm e.g. a house fire pre-digital etc Turns out there is actually a mechanism for this: - get multiple people to sign sworn a…

I tend towards being cautious with my information which has led to beauricracies doubting my existence.

I got my first passport at a formative period of my life (international travel does that). I looked nothing like the photo within aa year. It served as a passport until it expired but only created skeptisism as a photo ID.

I don't know how to drive, so do not possess a driver's licence. I am in a 35+ year relationship, but unmarried.

The only purchase I have made on finance was a bed that I immediately paid off because the the only reason I did it was to establish a record. This was surprisingly difficult to do because they were reluctant to let me have the bed on finance because I had no credit record.

I finally had to renew my passport when I bought a house. It was the only way I could meet the id requirements.

Prior to that I was leveraging non-photo id that could only be acquired with photo-id. It seen that will be accepted in lieu in many instances and allows you to get more similar forms of non-photo ID. All you need to get started is to find a staff member fed up with the ridiculous rules enough to click the checkbox to say that they saw a photo ID. It helps that many of the staff in these positions are more aware of security theater than the general public.

Being a land owner means a lot of those days are peassed, I can't really prove I am the person who is recorded as owning the land, but mostly organisatipns are happy that I am claiming to be someone they know exists.

Linkedin has stopped asking. I'm not sure if that means they think I am a lost cause or that anyone not on their books by now doesn't actually exist.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#296

Post by ghaff »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #273
giancarlostoro wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, if you're unlucky enough to replace your Social Security card 10 times, they will no longer issue them to you anymore. It is a lifetime limit, and they fan it out to 3 per year. Oddly enough, if you legally change your name, they will send you a new one regardless of the limit.

The circumstances in which you actually need to physically present your Social Security card are quite rare indeed. In fact, that is the first thing I was told by the ssa dot gov site, when I applied to receive a new card. It is very unlikely that you will be asked, even by a prospective employer, for your actual card, because let's face it: it doesn't even have a photo, or anything but that unique number on it. Anyo…

I no longer have an SS card--which was in a wallet stolen years ago--or, perhaps, a birth certificate which I looked for recently but couldn't find. I do have a passport.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#297

Post by wwweston »

b112 wrote: post #107
skinfaxi wrote: post #5

> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…

The sad part is, the whole world worked perfectly fine without anything online, ever, prior to 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago for slow-moving change. It's literally not a requirement to have it all online. And the cost of developers, plus coding + security updates + platform costs, really just means you replace a few assistants which would process requests by hand, with all that. Except? It's a lot harder to hack a…

Yeah, we’re early culturewise in the digitization experiment and high on optimism about the benefits, but not very far into reckoning with the downsides and incentives skew a bit towards carelessness.

The real danger is that we’ll be so careless we’ll discard other enduring ways of doing things before we smarten up to their particular benefits.

My hope is that disciplined people still have an intuition for this, even among the digitally steeped. Sysadmin/ops types tend to a culture of diversifying backup location and even media type. Maybe that can reach back to human legible hard copy.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#298

Post by teravor »

osinix wrote: post #208

The backups got wiped together with the systems, so they were reachable from same network. A backup the attacker can reach is not a backup. Good they had an offline copy, but a system this important should have that as regular schedule, not depend on luck.

    > backup the attacker can reach is not a backup
you can have append-only backup systems.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#299

Post by homakov »

codedokode wrote: post #125
mschuster91 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a poor idea to use blockchain for government registries. If you want transparency, simply publish signed daily updates and that's enough. A blockchain is essentially that, just with the daily update that's being signed also including the signature and hash of the previous day. Blockchain as a technology is actually useful here. It does not mean automatically that blocks have to be mined by third parties, alth…

Blockchain is unnecessary complicated, for example, it has mining, rewards for those who add new records, even VM and scripts and all of these are not needed for a government registry. I do not need scripts within a land registry.

> Blockchain is unnecessary complicated, for example, it has mining

depends on configuration, you can make any traditional web service replicated (replication is one and only thing that protects data in decentralized ledger, same as DNA is stored in every cell) using something like CometBFT on top. Mining/PoS or VM - all optional.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#300

Post by homakov »

margalabargala wrote: post #112
c7b wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internally, you don't need it, agreed. But that is centralization risk exemplified in this incident. Which isn't necessary. Every notary could be a node. It would be a lot more resilient, and it would look a lot like a blockchain (not necessarily with a crypto currency though) if you do it properly.

You can have decentralization without blockchain. A defining feature of blockchain is that each node depends on the precise ordering of prior nodes which is a huge liability if you have network disruptions, etc, in a bureaucracy. A git repo with cryptographically signed commits solves all the same problems without the headache.

You can't do any real money/real estate transactions without canonical order (chain of events). that's why git analogy is not applicable here. You'd need "main" branch to be canonically finalized for each and every participant.
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