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Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

theregister.com

181–190 of 258 posts

Re: Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

#181
post #16

Apparently there was a "blogpost" of a developer showing of their code, where they accidentally leaked access tokens in a piece of commented code: https://archive.ph/mP3bh This is completely unverified though, so take it with a grain of salt.

Assuming this unverified version of the story is true, the danger of accidentally leaking credentials in code is enormous and one of the reasons I continue to maintain and develop gitleaks. Those credentials[1] would have been caught by the gitleaks' generic rule [2] [1] https://regex101.com/r/CLg9TK/1 [2] https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks/blob/master/config/g...

It doesn't help that so many tools are like "give me your secret key in plain text in the config file" without at least offering a link to a webpage on the github of how you could secure your keys and use this software

Re: Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

#182
post #3

What do we do now? It seems the majority of people on the planet now have had some of their data leaked. Or are becoming ever more entangled with government and corporate systems which control and peddle their information as they see fit. Is it ultimately a big nothing burger, or is this some singularity we are passing through?

> What do we do now? I was thinking - if I had this, what could I do with the personal records of a billion Chinese people? And I must conclude - absolutely nothing. It's of no interest to me. Now, I probably lack sufficient criminal imagination, but the point is stuff like this is hard to fence because there's a very small market of buyers. In an article I wrote for Routledge about the markets for stolen digital dat…

You have email addresses I believe. You could spam billions of chinese people with some scheme. It doesn't have to be believable, but you can bet out of billions of people you will capture some naive or mentally ill people who will fall for your scam and potentially allow you to clear them out of everything they have.

Re: Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do we do now? I was thinking - if I had this, what could I do with the personal records of a billion Chinese people? And I must conclude - absolutely nothing. It's of no interest to me. Now, I probably lack sufficient criminal imagination, but the point is stuff like this is hard to fence because there's a very small market of buyers. In an article I wrote for Routledge about the markets for stolen digital dat…

After my data was leaked, now scammers periodically call my phone to let me know that "I'm from bank security and someone's recently tried to change phone number for your bank account" or "I'm from police and we're opening a criminal case against you". It was fun first few times, but now I'm considering changing my phone number because I could miss an actual bank security call. And I'm sure that plenty of gullible pe…

Don't verify anything. Just call the bank back using a phone number you can verify with 100% certainty.

Re: Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this unverified version of the story is true, the danger of accidentally leaking credentials in code is enormous and one of the reasons I continue to maintain and develop gitleaks. Those credentials[1] would have been caught by the gitleaks' generic rule [2] [1] https://regex101.com/r/CLg9TK/1 [2] https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks/blob/master/config/g...

How were the words selected for the regex? It's interesting that "pass" is not there and breaks detection in your first link, but I assume they were chosen based on the statistics? Is it covered by a different rule perhaps?

`pass` by itself might introduce false positives. `passwd` and `password` are common and more likely to be in the ROI of a secret. That said, I'm not opposed to `pass` by itself. I'll have to think about this one...

> but I assume they were chosen based on the statistics?

Nope, not statistics. Identifiers and keywords are chosen based on what I see out in the wild being a software engineer.

Re: Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

#185
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this unverified version of the story is true, the danger of accidentally leaking credentials in code is enormous and one of the reasons I continue to maintain and develop gitleaks. Those credentials[1] would have been caught by the gitleaks' generic rule [2] [1] https://regex101.com/r/CLg9TK/1 [2] https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks/blob/master/config/g...

It doesn't help that so many tools are like "give me your secret key in plain text in the config file" without at least offering a link to a webpage on the github of how you could secure your keys and use this software

hardcoded creds in example documentation... T_T

Use vault, env vars, GitHub/GitLab secrets, anything but string literals!!!

Re: Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

#186
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my dev machine's interactions with AWS, I use https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault You add the long lived IAM user API key/secret to it and it stores it in a password protected storage (MacOS keychain or similar). Then you invoke aws-vault with an IAM role and command, and it will handle obtaining short-lived credentials scoped to that role (including TOTP 2-factor code auth), and then run the command with thos…

I like your approach. So far I used profiles extensively. AWS_PROFILE is your friend. No idea why AWS doesn't heavily promote this everywhere they can.

> No idea why AWS doesn't heavily promote this everywhere they can.

Not Invented Here

Re: Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

#187
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my dev machine's interactions with AWS, I use https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault You add the long lived IAM user API key/secret to it and it stores it in a password protected storage (MacOS keychain or similar). Then you invoke aws-vault with an IAM role and command, and it will handle obtaining short-lived credentials scoped to that role (including TOTP 2-factor code auth), and then run the command with thos…

I like your approach. So far I used profiles extensively. AWS_PROFILE is your friend. No idea why AWS doesn't heavily promote this everywhere they can.

AWS best practices is to use AWS SSO, which accomplishes this same effect but without any long-lived local credentials. It works really well.

Re: Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

#188
post #16

Apparently there was a "blogpost" of a developer showing of their code, where they accidentally leaked access tokens in a piece of commented code: https://archive.ph/mP3bh This is completely unverified though, so take it with a grain of salt.

Assuming this unverified version of the story is true, the danger of accidentally leaking credentials in code is enormous and one of the reasons I continue to maintain and develop gitleaks. Those credentials[1] would have been caught by the gitleaks' generic rule [2] [1] https://regex101.com/r/CLg9TK/1 [2] https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks/blob/master/config/g...

Fantastic tool. We all know that _we_ wouldn't leak keys, but we have all been the person to 'rm -rf /' or 'delete * from prod where 1=1;', so it's just a matter of time.

Is there a plugin that streamers could use to blur suspected keys on stream? Would that be something interesting to work on do you think? (I'm not a streamer but it sounds fun)

Re: Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

#190
post #3

What do we do now? It seems the majority of people on the planet now have had some of their data leaked. Or are becoming ever more entangled with government and corporate systems which control and peddle their information as they see fit. Is it ultimately a big nothing burger, or is this some singularity we are passing through?

> What do we do now? Well, if you look at (global) society as a dynamical system it seems to me that there are two stable basins or attractors, call them "Star Trek" and "North Korea". In the "Star Trek" future the people in charge are themselves also subject to the panopticon, and the world is ruled fairly and humanely. (The other name I use for this is the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy".) In the "North Korea" future ther…

You could replace North Korea with China.
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