What Do HACKERS Do With YOUR Data?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
1,281 words · ~6 min read
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so there have been plenty of reports in the news lately about large-scale data
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breaches caused by everything from clever hacking to poor security
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practices to somebody just leaving a flash drive
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lying around but once everyone's email addresses passwords and credit card
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numbers get stolen what actually happens to all that information i mean is there
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just like a walmart for cybercriminals where they go to buy your personal
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information at rollback prices and if your information is indeed part of a
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massive breach how do you find out what are the appropriate precautions
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so one thing that's helpful in understanding what happens after a data
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breach is to realize the sheer scope of
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many of them it's not uncommon for these breaches to affect tens of millions of
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people at once and sometimes even more so that means that it isn't particularly
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easy for an individual user to search through large databases of stolen
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information especially considering the sorts of places that information ends up
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oftentimes this data actually will appear on dark web markets that require
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special software to access them where it is indeed
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bought and sold by cyber criminals hoping to rack up fraudulent charges
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drain someone's bank account or even commit outright identity theft
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now you can learn more about the dark web here but it turns out that this isn't
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the only place where personal data can appear in fact sometimes it'll show up
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in a much more public pastebin site
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what's a pastebin site you might ask well it's kind of the digital equivalent
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of the inside of a bathroom stall wall they're designed for anyone to just dump
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a large amount of data as plain text and these things can be great
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for folks like coders who want others to check their code for errors or i mean
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just anyone who needs a place to quickly jot down a non-sensitive information
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in recent years though some pastebin sites have become hotbeds for stolen
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data procured from data breaches now some of this data is put there by
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hacktivists who don't seek to make much if any money off of their exploits while
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other leaks are partially dumped to pastebin sites by attackers as a free
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sample of a larger dataset that they expect to get paid for on one of the
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aforementioned darknet markets and while anyone can bring up data
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that's dumped to a paste bin it's not exactly easy for the average consumer to
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go hunt for their credentials one by one
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after they heard about the latest big data breach on the news
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there is good news though there are easier ways to keep tabs on your logins
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and passwords there are services that try to catalog dark net leaks and that
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automatically detect when large data dumps appear on paste bins then organize
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them into databases and save them even if the original data gets taken down one
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of the best known of these services is have i been pwned which works by having
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you enter your email address which it then checks against a database of
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billions of leaked account records to see if you've been affected by a breach
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have i been pwned uses a bot to monitor pastebin sites for new submissions
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containing credentials and passwords it offers email notifications if the site
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finds your info in a recent breach and it also allows users to enter their own
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passwords to check against the database as well
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which sounds like a terrible idea
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but don't worry have i been pwned employs an algorithm that keeps your
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password secure when you test them by hashing them then only sending the first
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five characters of the hash to a server that contains the database of known
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breached passwords after any matching hashes are found
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they're sent back to your pc which can then determine if your entire hash
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password is the same as any of the passwords found in the database if you
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don't know what a hash is by the way you can learn all about them
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right up here this functionality has actually also
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been built into some password managers which can even tell you if your
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credentials have been found in a recent data dump so
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that's cool but then what if you follow these steps and your details have been
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compromised well step one is to change your passwords step two is to contact
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your bank and credit card companies if your email was tied to those accounts
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and get in touch then with step three one of the major credit reporting
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agencies once you've contacted them you can do basic things like freezing your
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credit for free or if you want something a little less
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intrusive than having your credit frozen you can pay for credit monitoring which
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will send you a report when anyone tries to open a new account or apply for
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credit in your name and that last one
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i know it's kind of a pain and to be quite frank i don't want to advocate for
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those credit monitoring companies because i think at least some of them
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are a bunch of yahoos and i don't mean that in like uh yahoo the company way i
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just i mean they're idiots i remember being on the phone with one
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of them and complaining that their site doesn't support two-factor authentication even though there's a
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blog post on their site from like three years ago recommending that you turn
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two-factor authentication on for any sensitive accounts like and the guy he
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didn't even the guy on the phone okay low-level customer service person
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whatever didn't even know what 2fa was you have a lot of sense of information
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in there anyway it's all you can really do and it's
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really important in the event of a leak that you take action swiftly if your
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information is out there because in some cases the company responsible for the
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leak might cover your monitoring fees anyway and the thing is is like you
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never know what could come back to bite you
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and where
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