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Comment by ryanlol | Hacker News Reader

There's literally no sign of a hack here (I mean, besides the statement that they're investigating), this is OSINT stuff.

Trust me, you could hack any recruiting company and they'd be sitting on much more data than this.

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If, like me, you don't know the term OSINT, it stands for "open source intelligence." What it means is publicly available information: phone books, mailing lists, published documents and other things people can find just by snooping a little and not breaching a security system. (Note: According the Wikipedia, this is a US-centric view of the term and may be different where you live.)

Recruiter here.

Due to the amount of turnover and lack of upper management effort you can "hack" almost any recruiting company. Most new recruiters have access to all internal records and are using a basic password (12345678 or password123)

It's not uncommon for recruiters to access other companies database to find numbers and email addresses.

Honestly if you have ever sent your resume to a recruiting agency your information is fairly accessible to anyone who cares to look for it. I can find cell phone numbers of most managers in the city because they applied for some recruiting agencies entry level positions 10+ years ago.

Yep. Even the spooky Stratfor[1] would have more information than this. This is nothing like what Snowden or literally hundreds of thousands of people who hold TS/SCI have access to (identities of NCOs or other espionage operatives, access to recruiting databases for foreign nationals who went abroad to the US for graduate studies and are being assessed as potential intelligence assets by their professors, etc). A pissed off 4channer with good Google-fu could get more information than this.

[1] Which I'm sure intelligence agencies are thankful for, because all the tin-foil hatters are misplacing their resources in designing conspiracy theories about an incompetent "private intelligence organization" which amounts to a bunch of people who could easily be outsmarted by a 4chan-er with good Google-fu. You know all those stories you heard about the KGB being incompetent, or now hear about how the Party is in modern China w/r/t information control? Yeah.. the FIVEEYES are about on par when it comes to incompetence.

> recruiting databases for foreign nationals who went abroad to the US for graduate studies and are being assessed as potential intelligence assets by their professors

Is this for real?

Yes, it also happens in the reverse direction. Foreign nationals going abroad with the goal of gaining intelligence from professors.

When I was a research assistant in college in the US, we had an Iranian student apply to work with us several times, even after we told him no the first time. We were researching the properties of yellow cake uranium for the Department of Energy! Obviously there are strict rules on that kind of work, hiring him would have been VERY illegal, but he still kept bugging us even after telling him that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Duffie_Shriver

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8xlUNK4JHQ

(I would like to see corresponding movies warning students coming to study in the U.S. about U.S. government attempts to recruit them.)

Here's a sign: there are the names and numbers of members of a secretive FBI counter-terrorism unit in the list. Stuff that, if not actually classified, is held close.

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