GoKawiilHackers Had A Live Feed Of Every ID This Verification Company Scanned. For Over A Year.
from the age-verification-is-another-phrase-for-privacy-breach dept
From the very beginning of this recent obsession with identifying everyone online (yes, they like to call it “age” verification, but it always ends up as identity verification), we’ve been pointing out that it was a huge privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Or maybe it wasn’t waiting. Maybe it was already happening.
This week a massive new data breach has been revealed that should put the nail in the coffin for the idea that any sort of age or identity verification could be safe. 153 million scans of drivers licenses easily available based on this breach, with more being added all the time. Literally on the day it was revealed (and right before the site was taken down) it added another 400,000 records to its available database.
There is no safe age verification. There is no age verification that doesn’t put people at risk.
Last year, Eric Goldman wrote the definitive piece on how all of these technologies — no matter what they tell you — are huge privacy risks, but people are still living in denial. This is despite the numerous examples we’ve had in just the past few years of verification providers and their customers having massive data breaches.
The latest comes to us via Brian Krebs, who reports on a massive breach of scanned IDs — more than 153 million drivers licenses from people across the US and Canada, now for sale on the dark web:
A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.
Krebs traces the breach back to an ID verifier that appears to be used by many companies, including Hertz, the rental car company. It appears to not be limited to them either, as he checked with a number of people who were in the database, and by looking at the date they were added alongside their calendars, found examples of other people who shared their ID at places like a pot dispensary.
That company turns out to be IDScan.net, based in Louisiana, which has contracts with thousands of dispensaries, not to mention Hertz, FedEx, and Target. And while Krebs is focused on how many of the leaked IDs are connected to real world businesses, it’s worth noting that IDScan.net is also doing age verification for a bunch of tech companies, has a page tracking state age verification laws and company implementations, and even has written positively about laws like KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, that would effectively require age verification.
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