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…
NY: Claim That Sheriff’s Agency Accessed Confidential Samaritan Hospital Records Proceeds
There’s an update in litigation that stemmed from a medical privacy breach involving the Rensselaer County Jail and Samaritan Hospital in Troy, New York. It’s a case that I’ve blogged about a number of times since early 2013, when we first learned that employees of the jail had their medical records improperly accessed because a…