The likes of Cambridge Analytica didn’t go away, they exist and absolutely go hunting for data like this.
The ability to map between different identifiers and pieces of content on the internet is central to so many things - why do you think adtech tries to join so many datapoints? Let alone things like influence campaigns for political purposes.
I’m not talking about assasination plots, but more mundane data mining. This is why so much effort in the EU has gone into preventing companies from joining data sources across products - that’s embedded in DMA
> [...] a bug that Google can kill instantaneously, that has effectively no half-life once discovered, and whose exploitation will generate reliable telemetry from the target.
You can't set up unmask-as-a-service because it's going to take you longer to get clients than it will take Google to shut down your exploit.
1. It can still take a while before Google finds out
2. You can log every mapping you got in the meanwhile, then keep selling the ones you already have
Edit: although probably most of your business will be over when word gets out that your data isn’t exactly legal (which your clients have understood from the start, of course; they could just plead ignorance)
So let's suppose that you did set up the service like this. Can you even make 10 K? What are your odds of getting caught? How much do you value not being in prison and/or having to hire a lawyer to get you out of there?
I'd take the 10k every time.
I’m not speaking theoretically, which I suspect most on this thread are.
Even if someone on telegram was telling me that Russia would buy this information for $100,000, I think I would reach out to Google and "settle" for $10k.
It’s a lot more work, of course, but you can scrape some top youtubers first as it seems relatively easy. If you can pull this off you can then try and figure out how to legitimize your offering – I won’t go into details here, for obvious reasons, but now that you have something valuable on your hands it makes sense to spend some time/money on selling that.
The scraping was def in violation of the EULAs. Product data is one thing, but I believe this group was combining it with other sources and selling the identities and context as a bundle.
"The Dark Net” – Jamie Bartlett “We Are Anonymous” – Parmy Olson “Future Crimes” – Marc Goodman “Kingpin” – Kevin Poulsen
Sure is funny there's nobody doing that despite so many people being so dead certain there's an active market.
And if I did, it wouldn’t stop people from doing co-ordinated disclosure either, would it? Same with high end exploits - some folks do co-ord disclosure because it feels good and is great for your CV; others sell gray market and we generally have no idea what’s being traded.
(With the exception of say, zerodium or 0xcharlie’s various talks)
First there are only very few gobs/companies that are sketchy enough to do this - and for those a huge number of non-anonymous people exist with huge reach that are very critical for years. If such a market would exist they would assassinate all those first - you don’t need the email if you have the face, voice, and name - since that is not happening they just don’t care that much about it.