Amanda Ober reports: A day after learning their sensitive information was carelessly tossed into a dumpster and then strewn about a busy road, people drove to DeLand in hopes of avoiding becoming the victim of identity theft. Papers containing the Social Security numbers and tax returns of school employees in DeLand were tossed into a…
Month: April 2016
This student put 50 million stolen research articles online. And they’re free.
Michael S. Rosenwald reports: Alexandra Elbakyan is a highbrow pirate in hiding. The 27-year-old graduate student from Kazakhstan is operating a searchable online database of nearly 50 million stolen scholarly journal articles, shattering the $10 billion-per-year paywall of academic publishers. Elbakyan has kept herself beyond the reach of a federal judge who late last year…
Turkish Citizenship Database Leak (Update 2)
Who would have imagined that backwards ideologies, cronyism and rising religious extremism in Turkey would lead to a crumbling and vulnerable technical infrastructure? Seen online after a subsequently-deleted tweet called attention to it: This paste with a link to a 6.6 GB file, purportedly containing clear-text information on 49,611,709 Turkish citizens, including the following details: National Identifier (TC Kimlik…
The Panama Papers
“A quater (sic) of Iceland´s cabinet members held offshore companies – even the current prime minister. Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson is suspected of having been influenced, also by personal interests in his fight against the banking crisis.” A new massive leak was revealed today. A storm is coming By Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer The interrogation…
How to Hack an Election
Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley, and Andrew Willis report: It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red,…
Mossack Fonseca warns customers of unauthorized ‘Panamaleaks’ data breach
Matthew Vella reports: Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca has informed customers of the impending media storm yet to be unleashed, as a leak of company information is scheduled to hit the headlines. Mossack Fonseca – notorious for its indiscriminate assistance to the global rich and nefarious dictators – said its data had been leaked through…