Entries Tagged "data protection"

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Bank Card "Master Key" Stolen

South Africa’s Postbank experienced a catastrophic security failure. The bank’s master PIN key was stolen, forcing it to cancel and replace 12 million bank cards.

The breach resulted from the printing of the bank’s encrypted master key in plain, unencrypted digital language at the Postbank’s old data centre in the Pretoria city centre.

According to a number of internal Postbank reports, which the Sunday Times obtained, the master key was then stolen by employees.

One of the reports said that the cards would cost about R1bn to replace. The master key, a 36-digit code, allows anyone who has it to gain unfettered access to the bank’s systems, and allows them to read and rewrite account balances, and change information and data on any of the bank’s 12-million cards.

The bank lost $3.2 million in fraudulent transactions before the theft was discovered. Replacing all the cards will cost an estimated $58 million.

Posted on June 17, 2020 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

Another California Data Privacy Law

The California Consumer Privacy Act is a lesson in missed opportunities. It was passed in haste, to stop a ballot initiative that would have been even more restrictive:

In September 2017, Alastair Mactaggart and Mary Ross proposed a statewide ballot initiative entitled the “California Consumer Privacy Act.” Ballot initiatives are a process under California law in which private citizens can propose legislation directly to voters, and pursuant to which such legislation can be enacted through voter approval without any action by the state legislature or the governor. While the proposed privacy initiative was initially met with significant opposition, particularly from large technology companies, some of that opposition faded in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Mark Zuckerberg’s April 2018 testimony before Congress. By May 2018, the initiative appeared to have garnered sufficient support to appear on the November 2018 ballot. On June 21, 2018, the sponsors of the ballot initiative and state legislators then struck a deal: in exchange for withdrawing the initiative, the state legislature would pass an agreed version of the California Consumer Privacy Act. The initiative was withdrawn, and the state legislature passed (and the Governor signed) the CCPA on June 28, 2018.

Since then, it was substantially amended—that is, watered down—at the request of various surveillance capitalism companies. Enforcement was supposed to start this year, but we haven’t seen much yet.

And we could have had that ballot initiative.

It looks like Alastair Mactaggart and others are back.

Advocacy group Californians for Consumer Privacy, which started the push for a state-wide data privacy law, announced this week that it has the signatures it needs to get version 2.0 of its privacy rules on the US state’s ballot in November, and submitted its proposal to Sacramento.

This time the goal is to tighten up the rules that its previously ballot measure managed to get into law, despite the determined efforts of internet giants like Google and Facebook to kill it. In return for the legislation being passed, that ballot measure was dropped. Now, it looks like the campaigners are taking their fight to a people’s vote after all.

[…]

The new proposal would add more rights, including the use and sale of sensitive personal information, such as health and financial information, racial or ethnic origin, and precise geolocation. It would also triples existing fines for companies caught breaking the rules surrounding data on children (under 16s) and would require an opt-in to even collect such data.

The proposal would also give Californians the right to know when their information is used to make fundamental decisions about them, such as getting credit or employment offers. And it would require political organizations to divulge when they use similar data for campaigns.

And just to push the tech giants from fury into full-blown meltdown the new ballot measure would require any amendments to the law to require a majority vote in the legislature, effectively stripping their vast lobbying powers and cutting off the multitude of different ways the measures and its enforcement can be watered down within the political process.

I don’t know why they accepted the compromise in the first place. It was obvious that the legislative process would be hijacked by the powerful tech companies. I support getting this onto the ballot this year.

EDITED TO ADD(5/17): It looks like this new ballot initiative isn’t going to be an improvement.

Posted on May 11, 2020 at 10:58 AM • View Comments

Facebook's Download-Your-Data Tool Is Incomplete

Privacy International has the details:

Key facts:

  • Despite Facebook claim, “Download Your Information” doesn’t provide users with a list of all advertisers who uploaded a list with their personal data.
  • As a user this means you can’t exercise your rights under GDPR because you don’t know which companies have uploaded data to Facebook.
  • Information provided about the advertisers is also very limited (just a name and no contact details), preventing users from effectively exercising their rights.
  • Recently announced Off-Facebook feature comes with similar issues, giving little insight into how advertisers collect your personal data and how to prevent such data collection.

When I teach cybersecurity tech and policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, one of the assignments is to download your Facebook and Google data and look at it. Many are surprised at what the companies know about them.

Posted on March 2, 2020 at 6:28 AM • View Comments

New Research on the Adtech Industry

The Norwegian Consumer Council has published an extensive report about how the adtech industry violates consumer privacy. At the same time, it is filing three legal complaints against six companies in this space. From a Twitter summary:

1. [thread] We are filing legal complaints against six companies based on our research, revealing systematic breaches to privacy, by shadowy #OutOfControl #adtech companies gathering & sharing heaps of personal data. https://forbrukerradet.no/out-of-control/#GDPR… #privacy

2. We observed how ten apps transmitted user data to at least 135 different third parties involved in advertising and/or behavioural profiling, exposing (yet again) a vast network of companies monetizing user data and using it for their own purposes.

3. Dating app @Grindr shared detailed user data with a large number of third parties. Data included the fact that you are using the app (clear indication of sexual orientation), IP address (personal data), Advertising ID, GPS location (very revealing), age, and gender.

From a news article:

The researchers also reported that the OkCupid app sent a user’s ethnicity and answers to personal profile questions—like “Have you used psychedelic drugs?”—to a firm that helps companies tailor marketing messages to users. The Times found that the OkCupid site had recently posted a list of more than 300 advertising and analytics “partners” with which it may share users’ information.

This is really good research exposing the inner workings of a very secretive industry.

Posted on February 4, 2020 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

Customer Tracking at Ralphs Grocery Store

To comply with California’s new data privacy law, companies that collect information on consumers and users are forced to be more transparent about it. Sometimes the results are creepy. Here’s an article about Ralphs, a California supermarket chain owned by Kroger:

…the form proceeds to state that, as part of signing up for a rewards card, Ralphs “may collect” information such as “your level of education, type of employment, information about your health and information about insurance coverage you might carry.”

It says Ralphs may pry into “financial and payment information like your bank account, credit and debit card numbers, and your credit history.”

Wait, it gets even better.

Ralphs says it’s gathering “behavioral information” such as “your purchase and transaction histories” and “geolocation data,” which could mean the specific Ralphs aisles you browse or could mean the places you go when not shopping for groceries, thanks to the tracking capability of your smartphone.

Ralphs also reserves the right to go after “information about what you do online” and says it will make “inferences” about your interests “based on analysis of other information we have collected.”

Other information? This can include files from “consumer research firms” ­—read: professional data brokers ­—and “public databases,” such as property records and bankruptcy filings.

The reaction from John Votava, a Ralphs spokesman:

“I can understand why it raises eyebrows,” he said. We may need to change the wording on the form.”

That’s the company’s solution. Don’t spy on people less, just change the wording so they don’t realize it.

More consumer protection laws will be required.

Posted on January 29, 2020 at 6:20 AM • View Comments

USB Cable Kill Switch for Laptops

BusKill is designed to wipe your laptop (Linux only) if it is snatched from you in a public place:

The idea is to connect the BusKill cable to your Linux laptop on one end, and to your belt, on the other end. When someone yanks your laptop from your lap or table, the USB cable disconnects from the laptop and triggers a udev script [1, 2, 3] that executes a series of preset operations.

These can be something as simple as activating your screensaver or shutting down your device (forcing the thief to bypass your laptop’s authentication mechanism before accessing any data), but the script can also be configured to wipe the device or delete certain folders (to prevent thieves from retrieving any sensitive data or accessing secure business backends).

Clever idea, but I—and my guess is most people—would be much more likely to stand up from the table, forgetting that the cable was attached, and yanking it out. My problem with pretty much all systems like this is the likelihood of false alarms.

Slashdot article.

EDITED TO ADD (1/14): There are Bluetooth devices that will automatically encrypt a laptop when the device isn’t in proximity. That’s a much better interface than a cable.

Posted on January 7, 2020 at 6:03 AM • View Comments

Spanish Soccer League App Spies on Fans

The Spanish Soccer League’s smartphone app spies on fans in order to find bars that are illegally streaming its games. The app listens with the microphone for the broadcasts, and then uses geolocation to figure out where the phone is.

The Spanish data protection agency has ordered the league to stop doing this. Not because it’s creepy spying, but because the terms of service—which no one reads anyway—weren’t clear.

Posted on June 27, 2019 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

First American Financial Corp. Data Records Leak

Krebs on Security is reporting a massive data leak by the real estate title insurance company First American Financial Corp.

“The title insurance agency collects all kinds of documents from both the buyer and seller, including Social Security numbers, drivers licenses, account statements, and even internal corporate documents if you’re a small business. You give them all kinds of private information and you expect that to stay private.”

Shoval shared a document link he’d been given by First American from a recent transaction, which referenced a record number that was nine digits long and dated April 2019. Modifying the document number in his link by numbers in either direction yielded other peoples’ records before or after the same date and time, indicating the document numbers may have been issued sequentially.

The earliest document number available on the site—000000075—referenced a real estate transaction from 2003. From there, the dates on the documents get closer to real time with each forward increment in the record number.

This is not an uncommon vulnerability: documents without security, just “protected” by a unique serial number that ends up being easily guessable.

Krebs has no evidence that anyone harvested all this data, but that’s not the point. The company said this in a statement: “At First American, security, privacy and confidentiality are of the highest priority and we are committed to protecting our customers’ information.” That’s obviously not true; security and privacy are probably pretty low priorities for the company. This is basic stuff, and companies like First America Corp. should be held liable for their poor security practices.

Posted on May 28, 2019 at 9:59 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.