Kelvin Chen reports:
It was reported on Friday (May 29) that a government database of more than 20 million Taiwanese citizens was leaked on the dark web.
According to researchers at Cyble Inc., Toogod (sic) a “known and reputable actor” was found to have released the data titled, “Taiwan Whole Country Home Registry DB,” onto the dark web.
Read more on Taiwan News.
Subsequent investigation by the government, as also reported by Chen for Taiwan News revealed that the data is old data from non-governmental. multiple sources:
After verification by relevant agencies, the data was found to have been circulating since before 2006. In addition to the recently revealed data, there are a total of 29 other data files from 2007 on, including seven in 2007, 11 in 2008, three in 2009, five in 2010, two in 2011, and one in 2016.
Ah… another leak discovered by Cyble, attributed to a “reputable actor” and which turned out to be ancient recycled data. This company is just making “leaks” up for the sake of media coverage.
I am definitely not comfortable with Cyble relying on “reputable actor” reputation, which is why I reached out to them to ask them how they attempted to confirm or validate an earlier report of theirs. And after this one, I am no longer going to report any such reports from them based only on what they call “reputable actor” status, since reputable actor means someone doesn’t scam others — it doesn’t mean that a seller or broker is always accurate in identifying or describing the source of a data dump or leak. That’s why I didn’t even report this one until I found some follow-up investigation into the claims.