25years of CrimeStoppers Tips to Police Leaked

31 points by sandworm101 2 days ago|6 comments

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the_real_cher 2 days ago

Scary if this info falls into the wrong hands.

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sandworm101 2 days 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.

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lopsotronic 2 days 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.

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classified 2 days ago

Believing in anything that's connected to the internet being remotely "secure" is like believing in Santa Claus these days.

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MatekCopatek 2 days 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.

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LargeKakapo 2 days 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.