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158 Million Records Exposed (And Counting)
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Aug 20, 2007 10:19 AM
from the do-i-get-a-vitamin-now dept.
from the do-i-get-a-vitamin-now dept.
Lucas123 writes "According to the
The Privacy Rights Clearing House 158 million records have been exposed over the past two years as a result of inadequate security. Data's less secure today because as fast as banks, merchants and consumers add new layers of security to their storage systems and networks, new technologies — or simply careless users — create new security holes, according to Bob Scheier at Computerworld."
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Fixed? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Fixed? (Score:4, Funny)
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i read it somewhere else (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:i read it somewhere else (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:i read it somewhere else (Score:5, Interesting)
What about a DNS attack, where legitimate customers going to the legitimate YourBank.com site are redirected to a man-in-the-middle site? Everything looks legit (albeit slow) and it's a near-picture-perfect real-time clone of the bank's site and the user's account info. Who has to pony up in this case? Linksys/Cisco for making a router susceptible to DNS hijacking? IE or Firefox for somehow not recognizing the MITM? Verisign for legitimately issuing a certificate to a hacker that he then later misused?
At some point a lot of these fall into the category of technological failings. Are we suddenly going to see disclaimers on routers and ethernet switches claiming "Not suitable for secure financial transaction data"?
The only way to truly end this is to remove the ability to use the data online, and require face-to-face authentication. Shut down commercial use of the internet. Not a likely scenario.
The next best solution would be to train employees and end-users how to safely transact business over the internet. Joe Sixpack can't even identify every button on his TV remote control -- what are the chances he can learn how to check certificates for authenticity? Even if he could be trained, would you then shoulder the responsibility for training him how to spot hacks just in time to have a new hack come out and steal his account information anyway? "Mr. Trainer, I followed your instructions exactly and I still got hacked. Here's a lawsuit for damages due to your incompetence."
And before you place too much faith in IPV6 to solve all these problems, you should take a look at every other piece of technology claiming to solve security problems. They're all flawed -- some more than others. It's just that we don't know IPV6's vulnerabilities yet.
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Re:i read it somewhere else (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, as we all know, fraud and identity theft did not exist before the advent of the internet.
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Very true. Technology, as it stands now, is very open to phishing, etc. You're entirely right - the technology needs to change.
However, such failings of technology is only a part of the problem. It seems like every time I visit /. there's a new article about how some company or another just lost the SSN, bank account numbers, passwords, identification numbers, DNA signatures and biometric iris scans of another 40 million people. It seems like these companies are actually at fault for this lost data, so wh
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At some point a lot of these fall into the category of technological failings.
Did you scan the list? I saw far more data loss because of shoddy management than average Joe's being scammed via a technical exploit. Dumpsters filled with paper records of employee SSN's and DL's. Backups being lost on non-encrypted media. Systems containing data that are stolen. Some people got scammed via e-mail, but most of this was because of shoddy physical security.
Put in place real penalties for these corporations (Kaiser fined 200k for putting patient info online? Their whole legal department pro
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For phishing sites, etc. There are technological solutions to this sort of problem. Just require better verification than 'the domain name matches the SSL certificate'.
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The problem is
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Yes, that will motivate banks to use better security but in the end it all comes down to the fact that people need to do their part to uphold the security that is already there. Protecting passwords, keeping information secret unless absolutely needed, understanding computer security enough to avoid keyloggers, trojans, spyware etc.. a lot of the security is the bank's responsibility but it
But it has to be reasonable for Joe Sixpack (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, that will motivate banks to use better security but in the end it all comes down to the fact that people need to do their part to uphold the security that is already there.
The problem with that is that current mechanisms are far too much of a burden for the average member of the public to avoid carelessness and/or social engineering attacks.
It simply isn't reasonable to expect people to create and remember a different, properly secure password for each of numerous services, some of which will only be accessed occasionally, perhaps as little as once per year or less. Nor is it reasonable to expect average people using typical software on typical computers to understand all
Re:i read it somewhere else (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:i read it somewhere else (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, if it were that easy. Pass a law and Windows bugs are fixed. Pass a law and dishonest employees will never steal again. Pass a law and a hard drive will never be misplaced, or a delivery service will never lose a tape en route, or a destruction service will never hire a corporate spy.
California (and a few other states) has a law requiring notification. Minnesota has almost exactly the law you would like requiring the leaking parties to be responsible for the costs, yet continues to have breaches.
Laws aren't like some magical "wand of protection +5". Sure, they give people incentive to do something, but they can't actually stop the dishonest people, nor do they protect us from the incompetent until after the damage is done.
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Re:i read it somewhere else (Score:5, Interesting)
You're missing the point.
Right now, the companies whose data is stolen have no financial incentive to beef up their security, but they have plenty of PR incentive to cover up breaches. If such breaches were to hurt their bottom line, the shareholders would make them take their security seriously.
As for the effectiveness of laws, look at Sarbanes-Oxley: corporations have created whole departments just to manage compliance. Sure, they bitch and moan abotu the hassle, but they comply because it's the law. Why can't they be obligated to put the same effort into customer data security?
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That's only partly true (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing we need is a new court order from each state government that allows a citizen or legal immigrant to simply walk up to a credit institution, post identity theft, and say "purge those records, NOW!" at the penalty of fines and being liable for libel and slander if not acted upon in
Re:i read it somewhere else (Score:5, Insightful)
As many people will point out, at some point you have to take responsibility for your own information. It's not the data breaches themselves that are really the issue, but the fact that once your data gets into the wild, it can be used for nefarious and often illegal purposes, and that's there is no easy way to deal with the problem. Anyone who gets their identity stolen literally spends years writing letters and making calls to various companies to indicate that in fact their identity was stolen and they are not responsible for the misuse of it. When it comes to clearing things up with the major credit monitoring services, it can be downright frustrating to get them to make necessary and factual changes to your credit report in order to get the matter cleared up.
We don't just need laws to make companies liable, we need a system in place to make sure that when data breaches do occur, that those affected can restore some semblance of normalcy to their lives with the minimum of fuss. And we need laws in place to define just what data any particular company can collect (remember: your SS# is not supposed to be used as any kind of identifier except for tax purposes) and more importantly, how that data should be stored (mandatory encryption).
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Bah! (Score:2)
You aren't addressing the core issues though.
1. It's perfectly legal to collect personal information and resell it. Criminalize both issues and the "identity theft" problem improves dramatically.
2. It's perfectly legal to keep decades-old records available on-demand. This is the Data At Rest problem which is only getting bigger.
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We don't just need laws to make companies liable, we need a system in place to make sure that when data breaches do occur, that those affected can restore some semblance of normalcy to their lives with the minimum of fuss. And we need laws in place to define just what data any particular company can collect
Yes and yes. I've been arguing the same way ever since a probably inadvertent mistake by a minimum wage local government staffer screwed up my tax record by linking me to someone else. The mistake itself wasn't too damaging, fortunately, but the really nasty things were the fact that the first I knew about it was when my paycheque was well short one month because of over-charged tax, and that it took me several months contacting several different tax offices to get it fixed. (Hint to tax offices: if I'm c
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And how exactly am *I* supposed to do that? There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of companies who are continuously buying and selling information about *me*. And you can bet that when these companies sell someone else information they have collected about me, I am the last person on the notification list.
Furthermore, these companies actively resist you being able to contact them. Thanks to modern voice-mail trees, it's pretty mu
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Identity theft has many faces, and while some are the result of negligience on the part of corporations too worried about short-term growth and profits, only some of them are, and many others not.
Re:i read it somewhere else (Score:5, Interesting)
It continually baffles me that credit card numbers are assumed to be somehow secret, despite the fact that you hand a waiter making $2.15 an hour a little piece of plastic with that number written on it without a thought.
The customer is in no position to create a new technology that ends this "open secret" way of verifying identities. There are much better mechanisms available, using public-key cryptography and some combination of passwords (entered into a smart card, not passed over the Internet), biometrics, and physical identity tokens.
That's up to the credit card companies. The reason people steal the numbers is that all they have to do is steal the number. Make it harder to steal and they'll stop stealing it. Until then it will continue to shock me that mere knowledge of a password which is regularly transmitted all over the place, and can be stolen from my wallet or my mail, is used as an identifier.
They blame it on the customer because they can, not because it's the customer's fault.
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"-making the financial institutions responsible" Anything that costs any corp money gets passed on in the price of their service. Ultimately all you accomplish is giving some new pencil pushers a job counting more money that YOU LOOSE.
The simple way to solve this is what I have done for many many years: when someone asks you for your personal information: LIE. Give them a mis-spelled name, transposed
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! (Score:2)
There are private companies collecting all kinds of data about you and I. It's why you get junk snail mail when you buy a house or have a child to name two examples.
2. The notion of "identity theft" is a tactic to legitimate personal data warehousing.
It separates the Evil identity thieves and the Good identity vendors. Except the root of this evil is the companies and institutions collecting and storing your personal data for decades beyond it's usef
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The poster's reply does sound a bit glib, but he's not far off. Of course no law magically causes bugs to be patched; the point is, hit these data custodians (companies) in the pocketbook.
Ask yourself: why do these kinds of thing happen so infrequently in the EU? The reason is that they have a more comprehensive approach to data security and personally identifiable information (PII) that permeates government and private industry. In the U.S., our laws take a sectoral approach. This myriad of laws and
But HOW would it "never happen again"? (Score:2)
Does the consumer win in that case?
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Solution is simple... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bottom line: Lock up your data!. We learned this back in the days of the wild west. Now we must - relearn; reinvent the safe for the 21st century data.
Sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
The people running these companies should be considered criminally negligent. Maybe then they'll start to take security seriously.
At least you knew! (Score:4, Interesting)
In my case, I got a letter from my credit card saying that a merchant whom I had transacted with, was the source of a breach. No more information on when this occurred, who the merchant was, how many people were impacted or how long they knew of the situation, before they informed me. Instead, the Credit Card company re-issued me a new credit card, at 'my request' prior to me doing or asking for anything.
The letter in fact was so unsettling, it was written to evoke a feeling that I had somehow reported fradulent activity... I called the company and spent 45 minutes before realizing that there was one of me and a seemingly unending supply of pod-people who kept repeating the same line to me. I obtained my own credit report a few weeks after and guess what, the aforementioned account was "closed at the customer's request".
The outrage in me continues, and I wonder what kind of risk I'm exposed to, but I don't know what to do against an army of droid? May be a letter will do some good? How much time should I invest in all of this without the faintest glimmer that anything will happen?
I second your thoughts on higher penalties. With credit cards being an increasing singular means of carrying out transactions, I would certainly modify my business behaviors with people who are not careful with my information!
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stats on what the breaches were (Score:4, Informative)
Numbers (Score:2, Insightful)
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Always going to be a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The big question is: What can be done to minimize the impact of the breaches.
The short answer - make it harder to get credit cards, loans, etc.
Once you change the way that money is handed out by financial institutions, all that stolen data becomes worthless.
But... that will never happen. Easy access to credit is the lifeblood of the debt driven American economy. So really, no matter how much moaning goes on about fraud, they still want a system that allows everyone to easily have access to debt at the drop of a hat.
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Hum... (Score:3, Insightful)
2 years = 365*2 = 730
158,000,000/730 = 216,438.36
wow thats a lot of data to be "compromised." I think some of these people should have had better measures in place to prevent this type of thing. Others just shouldn't piss off there staff to the point that they sell company information to the highest bidder. Especially when that information is mine.
And there are potentially 22 million more (Score:2)
And to top it all off, there's talk in some areas about sending
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It's reasonable to assume lots of data is being compromised because there is very little, if any regulation.
Given that data collection is an industry makes billions annually, I'd argue they behave like the tobacco companies. Cancer? What cancer? Addiction? Nah. That's a personal problem. Roughly translated to "Your personal data is safe with us!"
Security is an illusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Genuine security costs companies millions of dollars. Insecurity costs them NOTHING. They could expose every single piece of every person's information and it would have no penalty. None.
The government and corporations have no interest in protecting your information. So much is in the wild already that it makes no difference to them. 158 million people? What's 50 million more? 100 million more?
Stop complaining about this. The horse was out of the barn a long time ago. Security and privacy are illusions. They are gone and they are NEVER coming back. Your security and privacy have no value to the government or corporations.
Need a New form of ID (Score:2)
If I were "king 'o the world" I would get some international org together to develop an ID standard, then require all employers, agencies, and lenders and such to convert over (say in five years) to use that for all transactions, etc. Also set up laws and education curriculum about "your ID" and punish t
Pay the customers who get hurt (Score:2)
I've said it before [slashdot.org] and I'll say it again, there's a great opportunity here for an enterprising business to make money by providing insurance against ID theft, IF THEY PAY THE AFFECTED CUSTOMERS!
Summary: Leverage best practices and reward for it AND involve the customer to demand better protection.
Imagine if insurance companies offered a policy that would:
This might play out as
weakest link (Score:2)
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"aaaaaaaaa@gmail.com"
"aaaaaaaab@gmail.com"
"aaaaaaaac@gmail.com"
If you dig through your SMTP logs every once in a while, you see that stuff. Usually coming from a compromised home machine in short bursts of fifteen or thirty tries.
A few minutes later, another block is tried from another IP on the other side of the planet.
Plus, did you read the fine print on your Gmail account agreement? Did they SAY they wouldn't sell the address? Or did they SAY the wouldn't sell delivery of email to ac