Is this level of governance and sophistication really typical of vendors in this space? Sprawling enterprises I can imagine losing track of the odd place or two where the credentials are used, but a vendor who only does one thing, specifically a high-trust thing like this?
Even if they don’t have the wherewithal to be thorough in-house, am I confused to imagine that such a firm would have to carry insurance, which would tend to bring in specialists to make sure this kind of remediation is done right?
They’re not in the business of being trustworthy or secure, it’s just another software shop trying to grow product.
> which would tend to bring in specialists to make sure this kind of remediation is done right?
Ideally, sure. In reality an insurance company has many thousands of customers, they can’t possibly do any real assurance beyond basic compliance. Managing access and credentials is a hard problem for well staffed security teams, let alone a single compliance auditor.
Maribel again with Uber Support. Thank you for your patience while I took a further look at the deletion request. Unfortunately, we are unable to delete all of your information on the account due to security measures. Please visit our Privacy Notice for more details, specifically the sections titled E. Data retention and deletion. As of May 12, 2024, your account was marked for deletion. Keep in mind that deleting your driver account is permanent and will automatically delete your rider account as well. Any credits associated with your accounts will be lost. Additionally, I want to emphasize that we have strict security measures on the platform to ensure that your personal information and your safety are secured. Your understanding is appreciated.
First, because they're probably just outright lying to imply they're taking security as a paramount priority. They're likely following minimal guidelines to cover their own asses legally.
Second, because it's physically impossible for them to guarantee data security. It's like making a promise to a child that they're never going to die. A security breach is a matter of probability, not a door you can close and forget about. A society that allows companies to make absolute assurances about security at all is endangering itself. But it also means that levels of security and due diligence are difficult to quantify because we don't even conceive of it as a probabilistic issue.
(I also just watched the new Ashley Madison doc and it's really sticking with me that they made up fake certificates of security while putting virtually no effort into the real thing, and actively chose to play chicken with their users' data when they had the option of closing up shop - an extraordinarily clear case of being blinded by greed, especially as the payout was obviously forfeit if the hackers followed through. Both of these choices should have legally put much of the blame for the fallout and suicides on the CEO.)
One of these days, some seasoned and principled lawyer, who knows a bit about tech, is going to get ticked off, and decide to make one of these companies truly pay for their gross negligence.
Then, gazing at the obliterated company, other companies will try to get legislation to let them let them off the hook, but some of those companies will decide the party of recklessness is probably over, and that they need to start acting responsibly and competently.
Or even just coordinating the 50 states’ motor vehicle commissions or whatever since they are also verifying identities to issue drivers’ licenses and state identification cards.
Zero fucks given: "None of those companies responded to multiple requests for comment from 404 Media."
/s
When I said I'd no longer be finishing the application and to please delete my passport info, first they ignored the second part. When I replied again asking them to delete my data they replied about KYC laws and assured me the data was securely stored of course.
At that point I gave up. Maybe they could delete the data if I fought, maybe their hands were tied, maybe me fighting would end up flagging my info as a money laundering risk. But I immediately imagined exactly this leak happening.
They're not the only vendor affected that had my data, nor is this breach the first, but that's the one that stings the most.
Anecdotally I'm being swarmed by text message spam for the first time in months. I have to assume people are running through new breach data to find live numbers.
Principled lawyer who knows about tech here: This won't happen.
1. It's probably not gross negligence - gross negligence is an extreme departure from ordinary standards of care - the ordinary standard here seems to be to suck at security :)
Legislation could establish a standard of care here and make this kind of thing gross negligence, but that hasn't really happened yet.
It's also not obvious they owe a duty of care to anyone in the first place, without which negligence is impossible (at least regular old negligence) - this also needs legislative fixing unless you want to end up arguing about it forever.
2. Damages are basically all speculative - what is your actual injury here, and how much can you prove the value of it. Lots of people on HN love to say how much X or Y is worth. What can you actually prove in terms of real loss?
It's fun to argue speculative loss (ie the value of your personal information maybe being stolen in the future, etc), but most cases are about real loss.
In practice where it's too hard to calculate we often end up with statutorily set damages. That also hasn't happened here.
Sorry to burst your bubble - without a bunch of legislation here, nothing is going to happen outside of the regular old class action lawsuits and $5 coupons.
how hard it is to find a single company which does it right to testify? and then defense would have to find experts and several other legal counsels from similarly sized companies willing to testify that they also "do it wrong as a norm", with the extremely high risk of being included in the malpratice claim if the defense fails.
At this point, it's pretty safe to just assume that any personal data any company has about you will be leaked sooner or later.
I imagine it is the same for data. The longer it is available, the more likelihood of it getting out of the company.
I think our whole industry is rotten and we need to drastically rethink a lot of what we do. This is unacceptable and it shouldn't be this hard. We need a reckoning.
[1]https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/equifax-data-breach-... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach
The federal and state governments hand out these IDs in the first place. Shouldn't they be the ones to verify them?
While litigation seems appealing, the answer here is legislation.
1. Develop features at any cost, over-collect data, neglect security
2. Hacker gets in, pick the entirety of the data made readily available, credit card numbers, social security numbers, prod credentials, sexual orientation predictions that the company made on their customers for some reason, all of the pay history of the company, instagram creds of the ceo's girlfriend, and takes a dump in their bathroom
3. Try to shush the story
4. It gets exposed by an independent journalist in Kazakhstan who just reads /r/leaks
5. "we recently discovered that a malicious individual got access to a few logs on a random test server. Oops! So far we didn't find proof that it was used. Rest assured that security is our utmost priority. We love security here at ACME corp. Our teams have matching 'security' shirts, and every thursday we pray to Glombo, the security god. As a gesture to our customers we offer everyone a free 2 week trial of our 'security+' package ($15.99/M after trial, don't forget to cancel). Once again, sleep well knowing your data is safe with us!".
6. 6 months later the security gap is half plugged by an intern developing a novel password management system that encrypts passwords in base64
7. Go to 1. because no-one cares
OF COURSE IT'S THE CUSTOMER'S FAULT!
Is there any way to determine if your information was leaked? The driver's license picture should qualify as biometric information under some states' laws [2].
[2] https://www.huschblackwell.com/2023-state-biometric-privacy-...
The feds made sure our DL data wasn't protected.
ref: https://cyberplayground.org/2011/12/07/drivers-privacy-prote...
Florida gets hundreds of millions of dollars each year selling it's residents DL data.
ref: https://www.wftv.com/news/local/can-florida-legally-sell-you...
Companies are also incentivized to do it to prove their actual active user counts versus bots.
I think that I'm either out-of-touch or far enough outside the bubble to be able to provide an objective viewpoint, but:
Needing to verify government issued ID to create an account for high-in-the-clouds pure "lifestyle" services such as Twitter and TikTok? Fuck me, is this how far we've come? Is this the destination anyone actually wanted to reach?
The services you register at love to ID you. Government pretents it tries to protect minors, but I simply do not believe them. And if so, this certainly would not be the way, on the contrary, they expose them to additional threats.
I don't know about this company specifically, but I know it's common for the government to essentially act as an incubator for tech companies, so the concerns probably weren't unwarranted.
I guess even with the switch, some people probably verified prior so it likely has some impact on X still -- and maybe this is actually what moved the needle internally, since the users were calling it out as a concern for quite some time.
I had no clue uber and tiktok used them though, so that's good to know - thankfully I haven't given them my biometrics as of yet.
Slow down. Don’t trust vague statements that don’t cite sources. Look for the nuance in the situation. Be curious and try to learn, don’t just follow the crowd.
Also, it’s fucking weird to me to assume that all Israeli private businesses are unethical. Sure, there’s probably some. Sure, their tax dollars are fungible with the government actions you consider unethical.
But aren’t you penalizing the secular tech entrepreneurs of Israel by divesting from anything related to the country? These are the same demographic that spent every weekend for most of 2023 protesting their own government’s attempt to become more subservient to the Netanyahu coalition.
Stripe is Headquartered in US / and I believe Ireland - not Israel. Sorry for the confusion.
you misunderstood OP. He meant the previous authenticator for X was autotix which was Israeli and then they switched to Stripe which is NOT.
It may be stored in the us but accessed by people in lcol areas.
Obviously, not everyone who writes code needs a development license (what, I'm going to get licensed to write a blog or put up a site with fruit jokes?"), but if your business is going to involve personally-identifiable information, then you need actual engineering, and the folks that do that engineering need certification. This is a similar mechanism to how engineering licensing even started (in the US anyway), where Wyoming basically got tired of water infrastructure being built by people who didn't know what they were doing.
Licensing could also help provide individual engineers with leverage against managers or C-suite folks who want to move fast & break things. When you're in a professional class with exclusive sign-off capabilities, it's easier to be say "we have to do this right or it's my ass, back off" and should the company says "fine, you're fired", goes ahead with managing the PII, and a leak like this happens, the company's liability goes way way up. That situation overall tends to improve the leverage that skilled workers (like those who know how about database management for PII and endpoint configuration) have to do things right. There's a number of pitfalls that can happen with licensing as well, but I'd be curious to see if a push for something like this emerges over the next few years.
That's actually a very likely outcome. The startling statistic is that roughly half of professions require occupational licensing. In some places, you need licensing to become a florist. In several states, being an interior designer or a gas pump attendant requires a permit. Software engineering is an absolute outlier as far as highly-paid jobs go.
I don't think this is right, but that's the world we're living in and we should stop fooling ourselves. There's a lot of SWEs who are talking about wanting some helpful, laser-focused regulation. Well, it's coming wholesale, and a fruit joke website is not going to be exempt.
Definitely not a stretch for other (“important”) areas to start receiving such attention in the future.
When it comes to handling private data like medical records, driver's licences, etc. -- yeah, I'd be in favour that companies over a certain threshold have to hire licensed coders for these tasks. It may be a loss of freedom for a few specific coders, but it'd be a benefit to everyone else's privacy.
And no license will give you leverage towards the c-suite.
This is unacceptable. If you want my ID, you'd better disclose who you're sharing my ID with. And ideally give me a choice of providers.
This sounds good I guess but would be pretty annoying in practice for basically no upside for the business. I could see having 2 providers that are both randomly used so that we can continue business when one has an outage. But even then I would not be showing the option to my customers. The vast majority of users would be more confused by the options than happy about having options, and likely hurt conversion.
Why would, say, offering both "Verify ID with CLEAR" and "Verify ID with ID.me" create confusion then? Lots of people already use CLEAR at stadiums and airports.
And a lot of people - particularly students and veterans - already use ID.me to verify their ID (so far, largely for the purpose of eligibility for relevant student/veteran pricing, but it could be used to verify their ID in general).
How is this possible, when the journalist accessed the data to confirm it contained PII?
Each day I am more and more interpreting "we see no evidence" as "we didn't really look." That way their statement can be technically correct, without divulging any evidence that might be used against them when users sue for damages.
They see no evidence of it because there were no log entries telling them so.
Why there weren't, on the other hand, is a question far outside the scope of such statements.
Understandably not everyone who needs to verify your identity is going to implement MitID, I can understand X not wanting to do that for the limited amount of users they have in Denmark. It's simply not worth the cost. What I don't get is why more countries doesn't have this. The US sure seem like it would benefit greatly from having a standardized, safe and secure online ID (MitID may or may not be as secure as it could be).
That's why social security numbers are abused as a form of national ID number. The closest thing we have is the "Real ID" standard for state IDs/driver's licenses (well, ignoring passports). [1]
So right now government solutions are done individually by states (if at all), usually as some form of "wallet" / "mDL" (mobile driver's license) phone app.
All the state ID databases are supposed to be able to talk to each other, eventually, so maybe some day a big state's system will allow verifying IDs from other states but there might be political issues that block that.
I guess the other option is that a big state's system (like say California's OpenCred[2]) gets popular enough for all the other states to implement it. But I'm not hopeful.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act
[2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/ca-dmv-wallet/opencred-for-dev...
All I really want is to obtain a link by posting a key and some identifier, redirect the user there, have them log in, redirect them back and send my webhook a code that represents that user on my website.
A registered business would be able to (for example) request/buy age restriction.
Ideally non EU citizen could also obtain a digital ID.
That way I can stay blissfully ignorant about who you are and where you live. All I want is a single account per user (in stead of 100 000 and/or captchas)
They don't even have 2FA enabled for logging into such a sensitive portal?
Any service that claims otherwise is lying or will get sued to oblivion very quickly.
The fact that these sites are now forcing users to submit to these identity disclosures simply because of some potentially fabricated rationale is really concerning.
All of that with the nonchalant attitude of these data service providers, I'm deeply concerned.
Leaked account holder info: name & address, email, phone, unencrypted SSN/TIN, DOB, fintech platform
Leaked account info: status, type, balance, last activity, opened date, account number, daily limits
They have your data anyway, it's much harder to impersonate somebody this way, it doesn't require the verifying company to hire any workers to do the verification, you could even do it without the site you're verifying yourself at learning anything about you.
Both banks and carriers somehow manage to at the same time make identity verification incredibly painful and obscure, without actually protecting me against identity theft.
It also seems like it would make it even harder to switch banks and phone providers than it already is.
I've been seeing more and more carrier based verification, but it's hidden in the disguise of 2 factor auth.
Cash App and Capital One are two examples I can give concretely that do this, as I've been locked out of my account a few times until I can get my husband to read me back the 2fa code (cell carrier has a pre-marriage last name for me and refuses to update it).
I imagine this also works with other vendors. All you need is 1 company with a weak process.
I've spent ~20 years working in and around finance, on the trading side. If your lawyers aren't paranoid about KYC, that's a major red flag.
Do you mean you expect me to give my banking site/app credentials to X?
PayPal used two small (less than $1) transactions and the verification that I own the bank account was verified by correctly identifying the two transaction values.
Plaid, I believe, uses 3rd party auth with some banking institutions that support it, to pull read-only data from my bank account on my behalf.
South Korea and Estonia use government-issued digital certificates that private institutions can use.
There are lots of ways to deal with high assurance authentication, but very few are popular in the US.
No no. Over here (Poland), the way this works is that you get a big list of banks, you click on one, get redirected to their site, log in there, complete any 2FA they need you to complete, are given the typical oAuth "this application wants to access this sort of data" consent screen, and then are redirected back if you consent.
This is mostly used for fast online bank transfers, which we often use for online payments instead of credit cards, but there's also a system to use this for ID verification.
In Finland it is common for many online shops to handle payment, and authentication, using a banking account.
You never hand over your actual banking credentials, instead it is something akin to OAUTH2 - so you're at a merchant site and you'll see "Pay with Online BanK" with logos to click for whichever bank you have an account with. Exactly the same as "Login with Google/Github/Facebook/etc".
I changed my name last year, and due to other integrated services many companies automatically updated their records when the change became legal. These kind of integrations seem common and thus far "secure".
Based on my experience with (non-PayPal) financial institutions in the past year, this is going away. For now, it appears you can still force them to fall back to this when providing your login credentials does not work, but who knows how much longer.
if you don't know id.me, it's the new gatekeeper to your ID for any interaction with the USA govt in the near future. If you still don't have one, you are just not poor enough. But the time will come. enjoy.
_Papers, Please_ by Lucas Pope. _Engage and Evade_ by Asad L. Asad.
For example for AirBnB (well, granted some "conciergerie" service belonging to AirBnB, in France: but even if it's top-end it's still AirBnB) they wanted me to record a video of me of 20 seconds.
They're not the only ones to do that: I've seen other sites asking these vids.
The more regulated stuff, like brokers, banks, etc. shall ask what's legally required: proof of address (a utility bill), scan of the driving license, etc. but nothing more (at least in my experience).
But the non-regulated players: they invent stuff. They make up shit, apparently on the spot.
At some point they'll ask a blood and urine sample to "verify my identity".
Which would be okay'ish, I guess, if they weren't so incompetent as to invariably leak those data when a hacker shows them who can code.
I take it the KYC/AML will have to be modified to prevent anything more than what is legally required from being collected.
The US Federal Constitution, back in 1787, immediately authorized a government-run postal service. If a similar scenario was echoed today, I think it would/should contain a government-run identity service.
Governments already have a compelling interest to identify people for the purposes of the legal system, property ownership, etc. With all that happening anyway, might as well have an API that allows for attestation and Single-Sign-On.
___
P.S.: Not having it isn't really an option, since it's a void that will still get filled, just differently... Either with a hodgepodge of half-broken systems, or an abusive private monopoly, and no accountability or good appeals process.
> They're not the only ones to do that: I've seen other sites asking these vids.
So basically they're trying to do a "liveness" check, probably under the assumption that videos are too hard to fake (and hopefully they compare the ID documents against the video). Honestly, that seems legitimate to me. With data leaks and generative AI, it's going to be increasingly hard to do the kind of identity verification tasks online that we take for granted.
I predict there will soon be a huge necessity and demand for in-person notaries to verify identities for online services. Want to open a bank account online and there's no branch nearby? Go to some ID verification business with a ticket number from the sign up workflow, they check your documents, and then they tell the bank if you checked out or not.
They have been regulated for a reason. Without regulation they will also do all kind of stuff. (They still do a lot of really harmful stuff, but not as much as they could otherwise)
I was buying an iPhone from a cell carrier for their bundled cell plan deal. They used Stripe for payment processing. Stripe asked me to upload my driver license/passport and took a video of my face so their “AI” could verify my identity. I’ve been a customer with the carrier for years so my profile and credit card info were with them already.
The data collection was unbelievably intrusive. Really, I could just walk down to an Apple store to get the phone and went with another cell carrier. I did exactly that. Stopped the transaction and took my business elsewhere.
At least where I live, governments don't really let a third party validate the info on a passport or even on a driver licence outside of a few regulated entities like banks - so they aren't doing anything useful with these photos, except storing them for the inevitable leak.
i genuinely struggle to recall an active effort to continuously train, test, and improve security that had any impact across any company i've worked at. it's super costly work that feels like a pure expense to folks who don't know any better.
i recall substantially longer discussions - at the company i worked at that handled people's banking credentials and is part of one of the largest financial institutions in the world - about how we could spin "the disks that your secure data is stored on are encrypted at the OS level" to sound as secure as possible without lying. far, far fewer meaningful discussions were had about how to audit for real security issues or train folks to write more secure code or build more secure systems.
i know that anecdotes aren't evidence but i've really met very few folks in my time in engineering who had experiences different from mine.
inb4 the usual chorus of people who are rabid originalists when it’s a tech titan but concerned with the budget when it’s a kid who hasn’t invented Reardon Steel yet.
edit: I apologize for the low value comment. as someone who had their community devastated by synthetic opioids and spent all day reading people defend the Sackler family I was just lashing out at rich evil people and I apologize for the negative-signal comment.
