What a nice guy.
What is evil is the way that he's ensured that the predators in the dataset will never face any consequences by making the data available to HaveIBeenPwned, making it trivial for predators to protect themselves (the method through which this is possible intentionally left as an exercise for the reader), and making the data available to a news website for...some reason, but it's bound to ensure that the vulnerability will be patched out quickly and no one else will be able to access the data.
I find it much more likely that this hacker who sought out a website for uncensored AI erotica isn't actually a good guy, and might even have something to hide within the dataset. Hopefully, I'm wrong and we'll see more of this.
I don't know what the best practice is for keeping our personal data safe anymore.
(No, this official looking email from my bank is fake since it was sent to [email protected] …)
Yes! Just get a domain and have every email it go to you. Mine is something like “@super-secure-no-viruses.email”
Exactly that, yes! Various services like icloud or proton offer "hide-my-email" addresses, or you can use any email service and just leverage a dedicated email aliasing service like SimpleLogin (paid but cheaper).
This way your email addresses are always random, and since these are shared services, the fact that it's random doesn't identify you either. In proton's / simplelogin's case, you can even set the display name used and email first, so from the outside it's not going to appear as strange, or have any real limitations.
If you think about it, modern email services don't really allow for easily testing if an email address is valid or not, so pretty much the only way your email is ever found out is if you share it on. So never share it on. Always share an alias instead. With automated systems, you may even want to rotate it every so often, so that if there's a leak, you can identify not just who leaked, but also roughly when.
Fixed identifiers, like an email address, are terrible, as their lifetime is always significantly longer than whatever context they're being used in for.
I guess internet security is not as bad these days. :)
Sometimes with friendly / attempt-at-humorous error messages it’s difficult to tell
Obv an attackers ability to insert a message does imply a breach beyond a DoS. But I am pretty confident that message was not from the IA.
Submitted URL was https://archive.org/.
Is there any link between them and the real attack or are they just unrelated people claiming credit for it?
> Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!