Giant leak exposes data from almost all Brazilians
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[1] https://tecnoblog.net/404838/exclusivo-vazamento-que-expos-2...
Given the type of data they hold, you would expect they get targeted a lot more. Which is why they need to do better.
Much better
It's an Equifax buddy.
There was some news articles about it a few years ago. Even the former president data was there. Social Security Number (not as secret as it is in the US and Canada), address, name, phone number. Even some family relations. It was pretty cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia
> At the time of her death, Daphne Caruana Galizia was facing 48 libel suits.
> On 16 October 2017, Caruana Galizia was driving close to her home in Bidnija, when a car bomb placed in her leased Peugeot 108 exploded, killing her instantly. The blast occurred on Bidnija Road, and left the vehicle scattered in several pieces across nearby fields.
> According to the experts, who use artificial intelligence techniques to identify malicious links and fake news, the leaked data contains detailed information on 104 million vehicles and about 40 million companies, potentially vulnerable to 220 million people.
> Information on the more than 104 million vehicles reveals important details, such as chassis number, license plate, municipality, color, make, model, year of manufacture, engine capacity and even the type of fuel used. In the case of legal entities, the following were leaked: CNPJ, corporate name, trade name and date of foundation.
Every piece of information on this list is either plainly visible (for cars) or published by the government.
The article talks about data of real people (not companies), but doesn't say what leaked about them.
The link above seems to be from an unrelated breach, the one discussed in the OP affects pretty much everything, not even your LinkedIn profile managed to escape.
[0]: https://tecnoblog.net/404838/exclusivo-vazamento-que-expos-2...
Personal data (CPF, Birth day and so on), credit scores, social class, acquisitive power, and other informations that a company specialised in credit score have. (the leak is probably from a credit score company).
Nope, engine capacity, fuel type and year of manufacture are generally not visible on a car; the VIN is also not always publicly visible (in Europe, I don't know how the regulations are in Brazil).
What makes this database dangerous is its value for criminals in aggregated form... it's enough data to forge a car title, and assuming that there is another database that links VINs to individual people (either from the government or from a hacked bank), it now is possible to identify targets for a break-in attack.
VIN is visible in the windscreen on cars. In UK at least,
Guess which email started receiving spam very quickly? Yeah, the one he used for taxes
Pretty much everything has been leaked: most retailers, software companies, all phpBB forums, wordpress blogs, Experian, Amazon (3P Sellers, not AMZN itself), Dropbox, LinkedIn. The list goes on and on.
Notable exceptions: Google, Microsoft, Apple, IRS.
These days is a lot harder to see leaks, as most egregious spams get filtered even before it hits your server (I use GSuite).
In my case I'm just trying to live my life in a security conscious way, and detecting breaches is just a byproduct.
And of course the easiest option is to drop all that and just following Troy Hunt's HIBP [1].
This appears to be a new leak of Experian's Brazilian database, which contains basically everything about everybody.
In a country with 207 million people. This means that even the dead can't rest in peace.
On the bright side, we'll not have any data leaks anymore because there will be no more secrets to leak. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_...
EDIT: I wrote it
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/25/no-way-to-prevent-this-says...
Pretty much that. In the "Maslow's pyramid of government-related needs", the doxxing is near the top. People are much more worried with stuff like not dying to covid, not being kidnapped, not dying in traffic, paying the dreaded Boletos (bills), etc. Internet doxxing is dwarfed by the more urgent needs. Brazilians are also sure that exactly zero things are going to be done about these leaks. Some government representative is going to say "we're going to investigate" and that's as much as we're going to get.
I would love to be wrong here, by the way.
CPF being the number that people give to every random shopkeeper to enter that tax lottery. So, it's... not exactly a big secret. To do most official-type things you have to go down to the cartório with your actual ID, not just enter the number.
Heck, I've been to places where you had to use one to use the free wifi. Granted, in that particular case, it didn't care if you used someone else's. I wouldn't be surprised if that was also true, elsewhere, honestly.
I'm sure someone will find ways to misuse this but Brazil has bigger problems. Also, this doesn't seem to be a leak of government data, it looks like it came from Serasa Experian or one of its contractors.
So yeah, I tend to agree with you. If the government does something, it will probably be like that law posted on every elevator warning you to check that there's an actual elevator there, instead of just walking into the empty shaft. For those curious, that'd be lei estadual n^o 9.502 de 11/03/1997 - https://www.al.sp.gov.br/norma/?id=9419
”This number is super secret and you must guard it with your life and never share! Oh also write it down on every semi-official form, send by paper mail, and enter into all sorts of webapps”
I use a separate TIN or EIN (Tax/Employer Identification Number) where I can. All my businesses have one, even a sole proprietorship that exists purely in your head can obtain one, and this can go on many forms.
retirement time isnt a problem. if your business is getting paid and the person that pays needs your tin/ein then thats what they get instead of your ssn. You are still paying self employment taxes contributing to retirement.
When you use an EIN you're basically claiming to act as a business. For some cases, you can do that just fine. But a lot of SSN requests for identification or credit checks it won't work. And anyone who cares that it's a SSN vs a TIN can figure that out easily.
I don't believe the Brazilian CPN is meant to be a secret at all. It's used for literally everything.
In America, you don't give your SSN to your utility company or when signing up for an online subscription. But in Brazil, you use your CPF to do that.
You do where I am, because they run a credit check to determine whether you need to pay a deposit.
Legally is not supposed to be used for identity at all, except for Social Security (and IRS) purposes. But in practice that doesn't happen and it's not particularly secret. Used to be pretty common for people to include it on their pre-printed checks. When I was in college it was used as the student ID number. This was all before "identity theft" was really a thing people worried about.
The CPF is something you might use at the grocery store when buying a piece of fruit in the hopes of winning 1000 BRL from the government for helping the store prove that it's paying its taxes. Go to SP and every shop will ask "CPF na nota?" True, you can just answer "não obrigado/obrigada" but from what I saw, most people give it out.
You just don't see that same level of usage in the USA. You're not going to wander into some store and have the shopkeeper ask for your SSN as soon as you get to the counter.
At least it's not as wonky as our identity card number. For those who don't know, since our identity cards are emitted by the state governments, instead of the federal government, in theory a single person can have 27 different identity cards, one for each of the 26 states plus the federal district; all of them are valid in the whole country (and beyond, since some Mercosul treaties allow using the identity card instead of the passport).
All that data, just available for anyone to dig in and do their worst.
Source (pt-br) https://tecnoblog.net/404838/exclusivo-vazamento-que-expos-2...
Like Covid, this is likely to be another generational wealth transfer event. It will be interesting to see how much stays in the country, but I expect most of it will.
The reason why? While lawmakers, politicians and corporate heads couldn't give less of a shit about the average joe's privacy, they know that it's increasingly difficult even for them and their own families to stay private from too-pervasive, intrusive data collection, and they also now see ever more often just how near impossible it is to make said data stay secure from mass public leaks. Oops... Their own "optimization" obsessed nosiness maybe biting them back bit by bit.
It would be perversely amusing to see the head of some bullshit ad tracking firm, or bottom-feeding user data reseller, or the head of a snooping social network have their own dirty laundry leaked all over the web for all to see.
Didn't this also happen last month? (https://www.zdnet.com/article/data-of-243-million-brazilians...)
Quite a few, including a good percentage of my relatives.
One is particularly good at it. Aside from the wages his employer reports to the federal government, property ownership records, and an SSN, he simply doesn't exist.
His get paid each week in cash. Doesn't have a bank account or credit card. Because of his lifestyle and the type of vehicle he uses, he doesn't need a driver's license, registration, or insurance. His home has solar panels, a propane generator, and a well, so no utilities. I don't know what he does about trash service, but having seen the town, I wouldn't be surprised if it's still legal to burn your garbage on your property.
He's happy. Not paranoid that I can tell. He just lives a simple life where satisfaction comes from reading books and improving his mind, and not from hoarding electronic gadgets and social media thumbs to prove his worth.
Maybe companies should stop using these things for verification and start allowing people to use cryptography more efficiently.
If a bank gives a credit card to someone who says they're me, based on only on my SSN, I don't see why that should be my problem. It's between the bank and whomever they gave the card to. If they don't know who they actually gave it, well then it sounds like they need to improve their process.
But it becomes my problem because it's my credit score that gets ruined.
I guess it could be "we need a selfie video of you reading this 6 digit number aloud".
Companies and governments could verify me live to authenticate my public keys.
What we need is a means that others can be sure it really is us and we can sure that actions we have taken are credited to us and those we did not are not.
In effect we will need a system by which we have instant notification; similar to how some CC providers mail or text you each transaction; and historical tracking so that we can prove when we did or did not.
However there are not many unique methods to physically identify people short of dna transfer. I know that people bring up Minority Report whenever facial recognition comes up but that wasn't the tech they used, they used iris recognition.
So we break down each action and assign a value to how secure and verified it must be and work our way up from there. Similar to how self driving cars are defined, on a level of one to five how secure must an action be before its accepted
So because you don't value privacy and choose not to control you personal data, nobody else deserves privacy or to control their personal data?
I took it as a "it's there anyway and there's no point for me to pretend that it is not".
There are lots of things in our lives that we don’t deserve but we have to deal with.
I keep some data extremely securely, just not the data that I think will get out anyways.
Privacy is important, there are things that must be kept confidential, but the basic facts of a person’s existence are not necessarily among them.
"Nation wide Brazilian exposes privates"
And If you ask the politicians to improve security, they will probably say "put 2 more security guard outside the building".