Back in December, I noted a breach involving Disqus comments disclosed by a group of investigative journalists calling themselves Research Group (ResearchGruppen) in Sweden. The researchers had been able to identify – and then “out” – pseudoanonymous commenters. Kevin Townsend had some interesting commentary on the case, while Disqus focused on denying any security breach of their system.
The breach actually struck me as pretty serious, because we’ve seen this before where anonymous commenters have been outed for political reasons – with loss of jobs as one result, and/or risk to personal safety as another. Despite the concerns I had, the breach didn’t seem to make the mainstream media here in the U.S.
Today, a Swedish reader contacted me to alert me that there was more to this story. Automated translations of two Swedish articles (here and here) are pretty abysmal, but it appears that Research Group, in collaboration with Seppuku Media, has now used the information they acquired to start requesting hundreds of individuals’ credit reports – at least 400 so far, if I’m understanding the situation correctly.
It is illegal under Swedish law to request someone’s credit report like this, as a court case cited by Avpixlat article indicates, and I understand that police have received numerous complaints from victims and are investigating the matter.
I do not know whether Swedish citizens can utilize credit freezes that we have here that might prevent others from obtaining their credit reports, but if they can, anyone who used Disqus might want to consider taking that route for now.
It is not clear to me whether Sweden’s regulators have opened any investigation into the credit bureau(s) providing these reports to determine whether they have adequate data security or two-factor authentication or what. AB Bisnode was specifically mentioned in the two articles I read.
But that’s not the full scope of the problem. My correspondent also informed me that user data Research Group had downloaded has been published on a website in searchable form. The correspondent believes that Research Group did this to solicit help cracking the other MD-5 email hashes, but I have no way of knowing whether that is accurate or not. I am not posting the link to the user information, but it was sent to me.
Keeping in mind that this started with Disqus, it’s worth re-visiting their initial response:
Disqus offers an API service that includes MD5 hashes of email addresses in order to use Gravatar, a commonly used third party service that enables users to display a consistent avatar across platforms. This appears to be a targeted attack on a group of individuals using pattern matching of their activity across the web, associated with email addresses used by those individuals. To use our API or service for such purposes, is a breach of our privacy guidelines. As in all such cases, we are terminating the account.
Further, we are disabling Disqus’ use of the Gravatar service and removing the MD5 hash email addresses from the API. We will evaluate any further changes that will need to be made based on these actions.”
But the horse is out of the barn already. What, if anything, can or should Disqus do now? Can it do any takedown request or notice if data acquired from their server via API has been and is being misused? Can they use any copyright laws to prohibit further publication or use of the data?
I’m not sure I understand, how does knowing a person’s Disqus profile help them request credit reports? My understanding is that the group already had a list of people and simply used the MD5 hash to match that real information with anonymous comments.
I don’t see how making that connection gave them the information they needed to retrieve credit reports. They already had all the information, including the email, before Disqus was involved.
They used the Disqus users email addresses retrieved through Disqus API and matched them with addresses used elsewhere and subsequently managed to identify the users. From there it’s a simple matter to find the users real name and their addresses and so forth. Note to self: Never use your public email address other than for public reasons. Use a fake ameal address if you want to express personal views.