Nightmare down under: For sale: any Australian's full health record for a mere $22
http://boingboing.net/2017/07/05/medicare-machine.html A hacker who appears to have ongoing, continuous access to Australia's electronic health care records is selling access to any full record for 0.0089 bitcoin, or about USD22. The records are for sale through a darknet auction site, and the seller promises that they will soon offer bulk access. All that's needed to retrieve a record is first and last name and date of birth. The Guardian confirmed the authenticity of the records by paying for a reporter's own e-health file. Giant databases of sensitive information are very tempting targets. The Australian health record contains lots of potentially compromising and profitable information, including everything needed to commit several kinds of identity theft. Donald Trump has proposed to aggregate a similar database through his voting suppression efforts (he describes this as an "election integrity commission"). 44 states have declined to deliver all the data Trump requested. Trump owe his own election to leaks and hacks, and this incident highlights the kinds of outcomes we can expect to see when enormous quantities of potentially explosive data is aggregated and stored -- it's the equivalent of refining harmless uranium ore into immortal, lethal plutonium and then praying that none of that stuff leaks. - - - --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): https://www.vortex.com/lauren Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com Google Issues Mailing List: https://vortex.com/google-issues Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: https://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Google+: https://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 --- Impeach Trump --- _______________________________________________ pfir mailing list https://lists.pfir.org/mailman/listinfo/pfir
