>> The data was stolen last March by hacktivist collective Internet Yiff Machine. In a manifesto, the group said it wanted to disprove the claim by P3 Global Intel — the company hired by Crime Stoppers to manage its tips — that the platform was "anonymous" and "secure."
>> More than 850,000 tips — about half of all Canadian records identified by CBC — included personally identifiable information about tipsters, individuals named in allegations and even Crime Stoppers staff and police.
>> Street addresses and phone numbers appeared most frequently, alongside tens of thousands of personal emails, licence plates and hundreds of banking details related to cash rewards — information that could all be used to uncover an individual's identity.
It took me a little while to recover from the name.
I'm not an in-the-know cyber kind of guy, so maybe those guys are like the U.N. of hackers. But it's really hard to think about this story without at least cracking a smile. Seriously, you try it. Pretend you are a news anchor on the 6 o'clock national news, if such a thing still existed. Try saying the first bullet in a news voice and try not to bust out laughing.
That's perhaps broadly true in a very general sense, but there are many technical solutions that should be applied when you're designing a platform intended for sensitive anonymous crime reports.
It's reasonable to be upset if those solutions were not responsibly implemented.
Trusting organizations that are purely motivated by profit margin over everything else is the root issue. While technical solutions may exist that allow for a heightened level of trust, the idea that they will be implemented without the proper alignment of incentives is naive at best.
>> The data was stolen last March by hacktivist collective Internet Yiff Machine. In a manifesto, the group said it wanted to disprove the claim by P3 Global Intel — the company hired by Crime Stoppers to manage its tips — that the platform was "anonymous" and "secure."
>> More than 850,000 tips — about half of all Canadian records identified by CBC — included personally identifiable information about tipsters, individuals named in allegations and even Crime Stoppers staff and police.
>> Street addresses and phone numbers appeared most frequently, alongside tens of thousands of personal emails, licence plates and hundreds of banking details related to cash rewards — information that could all be used to uncover an individual's identity.
It took me a little while to recover from the name.
I'm not an in-the-know cyber kind of guy, so maybe those guys are like the U.N. of hackers. But it's really hard to think about this story without at least cracking a smile. Seriously, you try it. Pretend you are a news anchor on the 6 o'clock national news, if such a thing still existed. Try saying the first bullet in a news voice and try not to bust out laughing.
Believing in anything that's connected to the internet being remotely "secure" is like believing in Santa Claus these days.
That's perhaps broadly true in a very general sense, but there are many technical solutions that should be applied when you're designing a platform intended for sensitive anonymous crime reports.
It's reasonable to be upset if those solutions were not responsibly implemented.
Trusting organizations that are purely motivated by profit margin over everything else is the root issue. While technical solutions may exist that allow for a heightened level of trust, the idea that they will be implemented without the proper alignment of incentives is naive at best.
Scary if this info falls into the wrong hands.