the_real_cher
9 hours ago
Scary if this info falls into the wrong hands.
25years of CrimeStoppers Tips to Police Leaked
31 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by sandworm1016 Comments
sandworm101
10 hours ago
>> 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.
lopsotronic
7 hours ago
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.
classified
8 hours ago
Believing in anything that's connected to the internet being remotely "secure" is like believing in Santa Claus these days.
MatekCopatek
8 hours ago
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.
LargeKakapo
7 hours ago
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.