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Nothing really new here sadly, this information about me have leaked half a dozen of times in the past 2-3 years or so. These things will never change if the only penalty the company/agency gets is "send a message to your users saying you are sorry and that it won’t happen again".
Because of the inevitable breaches and leaks - KYC is the illicit activity. The selling point of KYC was preventing fraud and money laundering. It doesn't actually do that. Search for "largest money laundering settlements" and you will find 5 banks and one crypto scam.
Actually....
Say what you like about the French today, but one good thing they have is an electronic service[1] where you can generate single-use KYC ID:
More countries should provide this sort of KYC tool.[1]https://france-identite.gouv.fr/usages/le-justificatif-d-ide...
From a few months back: https://mjeggleton.com/blog/your-data-never-dies
The way to fix it is to empower one government agency to do aggressive pentesting against every other agency, hospitals, banks, infrastructure, and big corporations, with salaries matching the private sector. Impose a legally-enforced deadline to fix any issues, with a fine (for private actors) or demotion of the guy in charge of infosec (for state agencies).
Forget compliance checklists, KPMG "audits" and all that crap, just have government-sponsored hackers trying to get into everything like an attacker would.
France seems to have had a ton of government hacks in the past year at various levels, so it's sorely needed.
This is the same as the rogue police problem in the US. What needs to happen is a shift to personal liability for those responsible.
> The way to fix it is to empower one government agency to do aggressive pentesting against every other agency, hospitals, banks, infrastructure, and big corporations, with salaries matching the private sector. Impose ...
And now you've got private people empowered to attack specific government officials. In fact, that's their job. Btw: you forgot to specify "in public", and that needs to be how it works, otherwise it will just result in officials attacking this security agency. Oh, AND you're giving government officials an obvious point of attack: "salaries matching the private sector".
> Forget compliance checklists, KPMG "audits" and all that crap, just have government-sponsored hackers trying to get into everything like an attacker would.
You mean forget the way even the dumbest of the dumb can "provide security"? Do you think government officials in France got their position based on their IQ?
Of course this is the only way it can work, but this needs a very un-French form of government to get it to work.
I never received a notification from TAP; I only found out a year later through my Google One security feature. I certainly didn't get an apology—much less a free travel ticket!
When I was a kid most adults' full name, phone number, and address were available for free in the phone book.
His phone was spammed so incessantly he had to change his number almost immediately.
They have been reporting millions in profits despite rising costs. What you propose would further elevate costs. Shareholders don’t want that.
[1] Do you want my number? It's inside this list:
You might find it interesting to learn a bit about information theory. The entire purpose of your specific number is precisely to identify which number in that list is yours. Having the list of all possible numbers is irrelevant. Conceptually you can model that as everyone has that, all the time. But that's not enough to do anything with, because having that list entire list means you have zero information.
If you say "it starts with an 8", you've eliminated 90% of the possibilities. Now you have log2(10) bits of information, but you haven't nailed it down yet. For each additional number you give you give that many more bits until you nail it down.
This is a common misconception people have. I remember someone who claimed to have copyright all possible melodies by virtue of having printed them out and thus enumerated them. But that is meaningless, because the entire job of naming a specific melody is precisely the nailing down of which one you mean. Expanding the list of possibilities you might mean is actually a reduction in the amount of information, despite the superficial appearance of listing more numbers out, and when you expand the possibilities out to "all possible instances of the thing" you're actually at the minimum of information, not the maximum.
The coup de grace of security in France is signatures, though. Now, since you can't produce a physical signature over the internet, they'll ask for your phone number and send you a text with a code. Once you've entered it on their web form, you've proved undoubtedly you are who you say you are.
Same here. You can probably can find my address and phone numbers fairly easily from my name by a number of methods. That doesn't mean it isn't bad when an organisation spews out, or allows to be sucked out, huge numbers of people's data. With a leak like this it is practical to try scam everyone the list, searching for each person's details individually, and having to enumerate those people in the first place⁰, would mean no such attack would scale in a way to make it worthwhile bothering¹.
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[0] This seems strange when you first think it, but: the most important thing being on such a list says about you, is that you are a real existing person, whose identity could be exploited somehow. That fact is what makes any other information valuable.
[1] except for high-worth targets, which is why spear-phishing is a thing
People don't have credit card like the one in US and Canada.
The vast majority use a debit card.
How things work in France is much simpler and better. When you apply for a loan, the lender checks with Banque de France (national bank) if you have outstanding debts and if you've defaulted on any debts in the past 5 years. That's it, that and your proof of revenue is all they need.
I feel like if we're going to make progress in preventing wholesale data breaches it will be through architectural innovations that attack the problem of why a trove of concentrated data needs to exist. Even if the government needs to be a central authority, are there ways to house the data that limit the blast radius?
I'm sure there are innumerable arguments why this can't help, but when the mainstream alternative is despair and helplessness, progress will be made in the margins.
Facts at Equifax
So, you want the French government to fine the French government so the French government uses French taxpayer money to pay the French government for the French government's mistake?
What is the penalty for the government?
> These things will never change if the only penalty the company/agency gets is
I do not think penalties can prevent these situations. Perhaps they may be less frequent; perhaps people would get more compensation, but ultimately I do not think these can be prevented. The first consideration is why the data has to be stored in the first place. Naturally one can say "the government needs to know who is a citizen and who is not", and I can understand this rationale to some extent, but even then I wonder whether this has to be correct. Perhaps we could have a global society without any requirement to be an identifiable citizen per se. Things such as mandatory age verification-sniffing to never become an issue, because it is not needed and not possible and nobody would have an addiction-need to sniff for that data (we know Meta and co want that data, this is why their lobbyists run rampage via the "but but but somebody protect the children" lie).
„Small, not harmful leak of non important data, few records only”
Ironically it changes nothing for me as that same data had already been leaked by the French government agency that handles unemployment benefits a couple years ago. Silly me had not bothered deleting that account even after it was no longer necessary due to finding a new job.
Not sure how it solves any of the data breach issues, though.
This problem has long been solved with federated IdPs and MFA - something you own like OTP device/physical token besides something you know like SSN/tax id/password.
Most governments prefer biometrics of course because citizen privacy is the opposite of what they want.
Or... it's something that you always have on you which is incredibly hard to fake.
This is the primary reason I'm against biometrics used for identity. Yeah, the privacy invasion is a problem, but I think that's completely dominated by the fact that if everyone uses it, it will be leaked, and once leaked, can indeed be quite practically faked. If used as a password, it's a password you can never change. That is useless.
The difficulty of overcoming a security measure should be greater in cost than the thing it is valuing. The cost of, for instance, replicating a fingerprint given a photo of it, is basically a home hobbyist project for the weekend. Check out Youtube for many people who have done exactly that and give instructions how. When the cost of bypass is "home hobbyist project on a weekend", the value of what it should be expected to protect is correspondingly low.
(In fact I don't even use it on my cell phone, with all its access to bank accounts and amazon accounts and other ways to spend my real money. The idea of a password to all that stuff that I leave arbitrary copies of sitting right on my screen is completely absurd. Everything important is locked behind codes and passwords. It's less convenient than fingerprints but at least those offer actual security.)
You also have to bear in mind the costs of the biometrics gathering. If you have a physical guard watching someone do a retinal scan and verifying that they have put their real eye up to it, you're at least on track to something that takes a lot of resources to overcome, especially if it's in combination with other techniques of identification. If you don't have that, now we're back to "how cheaply can we replicate whatever passes for a retina with this scanner" and that's likely to be cheaper than most people think. Real-world biometrics are in places where attackers can perform arbitrary attacks with impunity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_transplantation
France already has that, in multiple ways.
There is the France Connect SSO, which is kind of a federated SSO. You need at least one account which is physically proven (it could be with the Post Office which send you a letter with a code to confirm your address and idenntity / ask you to physically come to a post office for an ID inspection; the tax authority where there are also multiple physical verification hoops, the social security system, same), and can use that via the SSO to authenticate to all government services.
Separately, there is an app proposed that scans your physical ID's NFC chip with your biomettrics, compares that to a selfie you take, and uses that identity to authenticate you to stuff.
Like they didn't have access to it anyway.
Also, apart from reuploading IDs, they ask for information such as age, name, place of living, and a thousand more things that they already have and doesn't need to be provided to establish that you really are you.
It also ensured democratic participation by all of the people employed there making sure that processes are followed and making sure no one is cheating.
We all knew that systems like this would get breached. It’s not a matter of, “if,” but, “when.” If we’re going to continue down this route because of convenience or surveillance and authoritarianism or whatever; people designing these systems need to thinking: When this system is breached…. And they should make sure there’s a good story for protecting people and the system from these sorts of events.
If you want to build a society on information, then you cannot forget the most important group.
It's the age of the leak and the sooner we accept, no matter our efforts, we live in a security free world and design around that - the better
Google selling data? So far no one came to blackmail me for certain dispositions, while the other does as they want, IRS, foreign governments, social security whatever.
Google can be sued while the other gives itself a pass.
Who is the baddie?
In Germany the administration put massive duties on IT providers and added punitive damage as a looming consequence.
Fast forward and the government with its “Ha, we are so digital!” and “Europe is better than US in CS!” suddenly has to swallow some brutal medicine I guess.
I stick to my guns: Silicon Valley and especially Google is art regarding code and CS evolution. Same for FAANG etc.
EU is hubris to say the least.
Every time someone says “Let’s build our own Google/Cloud/…” a penguin dies.
E Invoice will be a brutal boomerang, XRechnung the greatest backdoor of all times.
Your data, time to shift everything into the EU.
If that's sufficient to achieve anything then those systems are built on top of hopes and dreams.
Edit: does someone not realize that many (all?) the doctors and hospitals use to verify you is your name and date of birth (in the U.S. - although I suppose that's why since this breach happened elsewhere)?
"ANTS stated that it is currently in the process of notifying those identified as impacted."
Now that I'm thinking of it, it would create the need for an extra gaggle of bureaucrats to oversee the process,so I suppose someone might see a point to it ...
If the government were to hold themselves to account, they would fine themselves some amount N, and pay itself N using your taxes. It also wastes other finite resources for all the paperwork and legal action involved that could be used for something else.
Speaking pragmatically, there's no point trying to hold the government itself to it's own laws. The only time citizens do hold the government accountable, it's always done in the form of hangings, or the guillotine in France's case.