Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach

Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by flockonus on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:33PM (#41250201)

fyi that is likely to be a crime, at the very least has been cases of websites being punished for linking to illegally distributed IP (even if not hosting it).

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by bhaney on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:38PM (#41250247)

I'd be worried about legal repercussions if we were talking about the latest Disney movie, but this is merely the private information of a billion people. Never seen IP law give much of a crap about that before.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ethbr1 on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @05:19PM (#41250623)

Private information on people is Equifax's IP.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Zuiii on Thursday August 15, 2024 @12:49AM (#41253171)

A collection of facts is not and can not be copyrightable, especially when it was mechanically derived/collected (no human creativity). So, no, it is absolutely not "Equifax's IP".

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by dtech on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:49AM (#41253422)

Only in the US. In the EU and other jurisdictions is does have protection [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_European_...

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by hulitu on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:50AM (#41254390)

Yeah, in the EU it does have Palantir's protection. /s

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by adolph on Thursday August 15, 2024 @10:56AM (#41256870)

So I could copyright my SSN in the EU and sue Equifax et al.?

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by rjmunro on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:19PM (#41258909)

Not on an individual basis. If you collected a large number of them and someone copied them from you, then you could have a database right claim, which is sort of similar to copyright, but much less powerful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by basch on Thursday August 15, 2024 @11:21AM (#41257111)

which has yet to leak. as far as we know, the equifax data never became public.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Dalewyn on Thursday August 15, 2024 @04:44AM (#41254136)

1 pirated Disney movie is a tragedy.

3,000,000,000 leaked Social Security Numbers is a statistic.

-Joseph "Social Credit" Stalin

...Is it obvious I, as an American who can confirm my SSN (and whatever else) was leaked by this, sincerely couldn't care less because this is leak incident number 897165176548795647564576415671?

That $10 UberEats gift card from CrowdStrike would be more valuable than another batch of Free Credit Monitoring(tm).

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by rqtwteye on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:37PM (#41259085)

UberEats gift cards are the ultimate passive aggressive “fuck you”. To use them, you need to spend at least another 10 to actually get something

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by jmprspret on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:40PM (#41250260)

Is this NPD's "IP" though? Is my personal information that company scraped, now that company's intellectual property?

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by LorenPechtel on Thursday August 15, 2024 @08:48PM (#41262030)

Where's the IP?

It's like phone books--a collection of data, no creative content.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by lynndotpy on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @04:48PM (#41250354)

BitTorrent uses something called a "distributed hash table", for which there exist services to search it (btdig, etc). You can use one of those alongside the torrent name (NPD) to find it.

I haven't downloaded it, but my understanding is that the data comes compressed and with a (weak) password.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by hypeatei on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @06:06PM (#41251002)

Here is a strongly encrypted base64 version to keep hackers out:

bWFnbmV0Oj94dD11cm46YnRpaDozY2FhNzFmM2VjOGNiY2NjNmZjYTRmZWI3MTg1ZGEyYmFiMTQ5YmE3JmRuPU5QRCZ0cj11ZHA6Ly90cmFja2VyLm9wZW5iaXR0b3JyZW50LmNvbTo4MCZ0cj11ZHA6Ly90cmFja2VyLm9wZW50cmFja3Iub3JnOjEzMzcvYW5ub3VuY2U=

Allegedly, the password (also base64 encrypted) is:

aHR0cHM6Ly91c2RvZC5pby8=

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Aeolun on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:39PM (#41252141)

Has anyone been able to reverse this base64 encryption? Whatever am I going to do with this?

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by acidburnNSA on Wednesday August 14, 2024 @08:57PM (#41252228)

It can't be reversed, unfortunately. base64 has been peer proven as mathematically unhackable.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by harshreality on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:46AM (#41253638)

Username checks out.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by meowface on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:13AM (#41254249)

Same for base16. That's why those pesky hash digests always use it.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by LadyCailin on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:43PM (#41260684)

rot13 is way faster though.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by jzemeocala on Monday August 19, 2024 @11:35AM (#41291929)

do you still hang out with CrashOverRide?

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by acidburnNSA on Saturday August 24, 2024 @12:03PM (#41339158)

Only in phonebooths during slow-motion, rotating hack montages.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by 29athrowaway on Thursday August 15, 2024 @12:20AM (#41253061)

It's not encryption it's encoding. It can be trivially decoded

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by oxidant on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:22AM (#41253323)

I'm not sure. There are 64 bases. Probably quantum proof.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by bool3max on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:50AM (#41253426)

How about you post the decrypted version then genius?

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mango7283 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:39AM (#41253613)

https://www.base64decode.org/

Just paste in and decode and tadah

Sincerely I hope you are not in a technical IT role.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by vlovich123 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:49AM (#41253654)

Sincerely I hope you don’t try reading Jonathan Swift - you may start trying to eat children.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mango7283 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:26AM (#41253799)

Yeah ok I was stupid

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by saintradon on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:58AM (#41253686)

Dude it's just a joke

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mango7283 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:41AM (#41253865)

Yeah I'm dumb and was having a bad day

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by spacebacon on Thursday August 15, 2024 @06:27AM (#41254533)

Happens to the best of us. Life is a dance not a maze.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by mango7283 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:41AM (#41253618)

https://www.base64decode.org/

I hope this helps you

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by qwertox on Thursday August 15, 2024 @04:05AM (#41253960)

Wasn't it a joke?

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Aeolun on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:18PM (#41258289)

I just knew someone was going to take it seriously xD

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Aeolun on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:19PM (#41258306)

It was a joke, but thank you. The internet needs more helpful people.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by AmpsterMan on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:33PM (#41258470)

I get it now, but I have so much imposter syndrome that I wasn't sure if this was ACTUALLY something I needed to figure out -__-

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Vicinity9635 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @01:43PM (#41258553)

I dug into this a little and one of the files is 164GB. How do you even work with these files? That is, how would I search for my SSN on my windows box?

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by diggan on Thursday August 15, 2024 @02:29PM (#41258995)

That's not even that big? `cat big_file | grep -v my_term` would go line-by-line and show any lines matching your query. If you're doing a lot of queries, you'd probably want to index it, so you throw it into a sqlite database with the usual SQL utils.

Edit: I missed you said Windows. Probably Powershell have similar utilities, so you can do `ReadFileLineByLine \r \d big_file | ReturnHitBySearchTerm \v \t \s my_term` or something similar.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by kaiwenwang on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:21PM (#41259441)

Using sift on a 100GB txt file still takes multiple minutes. I haven't tried ag, but grep is supposedly slower.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by kelnos on Thursday August 15, 2024 @04:03PM (#41259814)

If the desire is just to grep for your name, email address, whatever, and then throw the rest of the data away, I don't think waiting multiple minutes is a big deal.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by 6031769 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @04:54PM (#41260273)

You absolutely do not want to use "-v" with that grep.

Nor do you want to use cat (UUoCA) but that's very much a minor point in comparison.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by SahAssar on Friday August 16, 2024 @09:36AM (#41266303)

UUoCA: https://porkmail.org/era/unix/award

I hadn't heard of it before.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by Vicinity9635 on Thursday August 15, 2024 @05:52PM (#41260781)

>ReadFileLineByLine \r \d ssn.txt | ReturnHitBySearchTerm \v \t \s trampas ReadFileLineByLine : The term 'ReadFileLineByLine' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. At line:1 char:1 + ReadFileLineByLine \r \d ssn.txt | ReturnHitBySearchTerm \v \t \s tra ... + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (ReadFileLineByLine:String) [], CommandNotFoundException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

:(

All I know about powershell I just learned by accident: ls works

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by majorchord on Thursday August 15, 2024 @11:14PM (#41262827)

I can't believe HN mods think it's ok to leave this comment up. I don't know of a way to report it myself unfortunately.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by hypeatei on Saturday August 17, 2024 @03:17PM (#41277153)

Excuse me, why is linking to something bad? Especially when it contains your own data?

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ranger_danger on Saturday August 17, 2024 @08:40PM (#41279241)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing?lang=en

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by hypeatei on Sunday August 18, 2024 @05:29AM (#41281221)

Doxxing involves targeting an individual, as mentioned in the first line of that wiki page.

I'm not publishing or leaking any data either. I'm linking to something that was already made public which contains my own data.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by ranger_danger on Sunday August 18, 2024 @10:09AM (#41282475)

Linking to personal information may be considered publishing in some areas.

Also it's just a really crappy thing to do IMO.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by robustcollector on Friday August 16, 2024 @07:32AM (#41265363)

Elsewhere in this thread I posted a detailed commentary on what the torrent contains.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by e40 on Friday August 16, 2024 @12:51PM (#41268094)

Anyone know the size after the 50GB file is un7zipped?

EDIT: answer: 2 files, 176GB and 120GB, total is 298GB.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by e40 on Friday August 16, 2024 @03:44PM (#41269677)

Entire family is in the list, with every address they've lived at in the last 40 years.

Freeze your credit reports, folks.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by LorenPechtel on Saturday August 17, 2024 @12:11PM (#41275534)

FYI: This is only the two social security files, not the whole breach.

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Re:Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach by eks391 on Saturday August 17, 2024 @09:33AM (#41274473)

You can check to see if you were in the breach here:

https://npd.pentester.com/search

This will save you the effort of a 30min search per `grep` on the original breached files.

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