The loudest information leaks in history: Why it happened and what did it lead to

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Any layman knows that "who owns information, he rules the world," and therefore it is carefully protected from outside encroachments. However, the measures taken are not always effective, because the world now and then announce scandals about information leakage, and the images of spies - information hunters, are romanticized by the cinema of all countries. What was so terrible about the loudest data leaks, whose fault did they happen and what did they eventually lead to?

The last question, given that the whole country has been discussing the scandal with football player Artem Dzyuba for several months now, seems even inappropriate. Yes, it is not enough to have information, you need to be able to use it profitably. But sometimes you can pay with something more expensive than money. It is not surprising that scandals around data leaks flare up on the very fact of what happened, even if they did not lead to dire consequences. It is enough that these very sad consequences could have happened through someone's fault.

Vladimir Vetrov: "keep your nose to the wind"

His name has been preserved in history as the name of a man who betrayed his homeland, his dignity and became a clear evidence of the imperfection of the Soviet intelligence service, despite the Sami's strict security measures and endless control. After receiving higher education, he ends up in the KGB, at the time of his first business trip abroad he already had two years of work in this field behind him. He went to France as an engineer at Mashpriborintorg, where he actively collects information of a scientific and technical nature, which attracts the attention of his French colleagues. As the saying goes, "fisherman - fisherman."

No sooner had the French found out in detail who he was than Vetrov provided them with such an opportunity, having had an accident in a foreign country in an official car. French agents planned to blackmail him, but Vladimir succeeded in leaving for the USSR - the business trip was over. But he left with a sense of duty to a new acquaintance who helped him with the repair of the car.

During a business trip to Canada, he again gets into a mess, but this cannot be called an accident, because he himself bought antiques in Moscow in advance, which he tried to sell abroad. Jewelry turned out to be stolen, Vetrov was a victim in the case. Here he receives a direct offer to work against his country, but he does not give an affirmative answer.

At home, the KGB-Schnick was in for an unpleasant surprise, for such an ambiguous behavior during business trips and attracting attention, he was transferred from operatives to an armchair worker - he had to collect and analyze the incoming data. So, goodbye to foreign business trips, the possibility of selling antiques, buying a deficit and much, much more. His demotion coincides with the promotion of a colleague, with whom he was in an unspoken rivalry, and Vetrov begins to think about how to take revenge on them all. However, he already had the answer to this question.

At one of the international exhibitions, he meets his acquaintance, through whom he asks to convey a letter to the Frenchman who helped him with the repair of the car (to the agent). However, an acquaintance does not carry this letter to the addressee, but sends it directly to the counterintelligence service. In the letter, by the way, he briefly told about himself and offered his services. This is how Vetrov's cooperation with French intelligence began.

More than 4 thousand documents from the "Top Secret" section, a list of 250 officers from scientific and technical intelligence (they were distributed around the world), 70 names of people providing information to the KGB and almost 500 intelligence officers of the USSR were disclosed by Vetrov.

But Vetrov, nevertheless, was a talented scout, albeit not a very good person. It was never revealed. They put him on a different matter - he tried to kill his own mistress when she persuaded him to divorce, and killed a man who wanted to intercede for her. Apparently, long-term cooperation with foreign agents finally shattered his nervous system and he, as a result, broke down. Having already received condemnation under this article, Vetrov began to be studied for betrayal to the Motherland. It was then that everything was revealed. As a result, he was sentenced to death by shooting.

Cellular operators as a treasure trove of personal information

With the active introduction of gadgets and information technologies into life, information leakage began to be of a different nature, but at the same time it became widespread. As a result of hacker hacking, a huge amount of personal data can be made public, which means that there will be many more victims.

In 2011, Megafon subscribers were unpleasantly surprised by the fact that the SMS messages they sent through the operator's website became available through a search engine. This happened due to the mistake of the employees of the cellular company, who did not close the intermediate pages from robotic indexing. The company convinced subscribers that a negligible amount of SMS got into the network, moreover, it did not touch those sent through mobile gadgets.

However, this did not save the company from litigation, the operator was brought to administrative responsibility and a fine. However, the amount of the fine of several thousand rubles hardly served as a lesson for the huge cellular company, where more damage was done to its reputation. It is likely that many subscribers would now prefer other cellular operators, but that same year, another major player in the market for this service industry went wild on a much larger scale.

More than one and a half million subscribers whose numbers began with 911 and 917 became victims of illegally disclosed personal information. On a specially created site, not only personal, but also passport data, including registration addresses, became available. The operator immediately assured that the perpetrators would be dismissed, and the system for working with information would be tightened many times over. On the Internet for a long time, the opinion was circulated that the data was merged into the network through the fault of the special services.

The third leader of cellular operators also did not stay away from scandals of this kind, the investigative committee worked out information that VimpelCom and MTS transmitted data about their subscribers, including correspondence and messages to unknown persons. VimpelCom admitted that such an incident took place and promised to investigate. The employee was dismissed and a criminal case was opened against him.

Online shops and entertainment portals

Messages and personal data are far from the only thing that a person chooses not to talk about. For example, about purchases in a number of online stores, users would also prefer not to tell everyone in a row. All in the same 2011, through a browser search engine, one could find data on what a particular person ordered in a given store. One could see not only the status of the order, but also its contents, place of delivery and the name of the customer.

Everything would be fine, but among the stores, orders in which became publicly available, there were not only books, games and perfumery and cosmetics stores, but also sites selling intimate goods. How can we not recall the incident with Dziuba, because this sphere of a person's personal life always arouses general interest, and a serious scandal around a certain person can flare up.

If in this case the error ended without major scandals, then the Target chain of stores caused much more indignation, if only because there it was already a question of monetary losses. The criminals through the site gained access to credit cards of users who had previously paid for services on this site and received $ 40 million. They also opened access to the personal data of 70 million people who were clients of this system.

We did not escape a similar fate at Sony online. Moreover, the outraged users flooded the company with lawsuits in total exceeding $ 170 million. This story displaced Sony from the first place in gaming networks and was remembered for a long time, having hurt the company's reputation.

Banks and payment systems

Despite the fact that the issue of punishing banks for leaking information about clients' transactions and their financial operations of any nature has been repeatedly raised, bank representatives always deny their own involvement in such leaks (of course!). Shifting all responsibility on abstract hackers who manage to get information through mobile applications and other service methods, and the passwords are revealed by the clients themselves.

However, experts do not exclude the fact that traditionally little attention is paid to the employees of banks themselves, because one cannot exclude the possibility that the employees themselves disclose this data to fraudsters. One way or another, there are not so many high-profile scandals in this area, but almost every client of the bank has faced this kind of information leak. This means that this area is one of the most corrupt in terms of information protection, moreover, it has a minimum percentage of crimes solved.

One of the largest information leaks occurred in the Heartland Payment Systems payment system. The security system was violated, as a result of which the data on 130 million cards and their owners fell into the hands of fraudsters. Special software was installed that spied on any card operations on the networks and read data. The company was active, serving hundreds of thousands of customers, so the damage was enormous.

This case is also notable for the fact that the culprit was identified, who received a real term. After it became clear that he was involved in some more hacker attacks, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The Belarusian bank, in the same 2011, let the data of two thousand of its clients, who had previously applied for a loan, into the network. Their data was in direct access right on the bank's website (passport data, information about the place of work, loan application), and all this hung on the website for more than 10 hours. The bank itself disclaimed responsibility, stating that the information inside the bank is reliably protected, and the data on the site appeared from external servers that provide hosting services.

Social networks

It would seem that social networks themselves are just a storehouse of information about a person. Name, photo, location, information about relatives, friends, photos, not to mention the possibility of personal correspondence, by which you can find out anything you want.

For example, the recent scandal with Facebook revealed the weakness of the social network, when a company collecting data for a sociological study was able to obtain information on 50 million Facebook users without their permission. The users themselves are not that much affected by the leakage of their data. But supposedly the information obtained in the course of such a sociological study helped advertisers to make the necessary settings in the same network and, thereby, influence the election of the President of the United States.

After the scandal, the social network and its founder admitted their mistake, made the necessary improvements, the disclosed data was destroyed. Users are apologized. However, after that it became obvious that user data is already available in the databases of dozens of developers of various applications and advertisers. The social network Vkontakte had a similar problem. A huge number of copies of documents, passwords were available through a simple search engine, but after the scandal erupted, VKontakte hid these data with privacy settings.

Government Service Sites

Government websites that accompany transactions and provide official information are usually more trusted, however, they are regularly subjected to hacker attacks. So, in the Perm regional office of the Pension Fund of Russia there was a data leak. Some of the personal data of the recipients of the services ended up on the Internet, and it could be found simply by googling. The site administrators were accused of this, that is, sometimes it is possible to do without hackers, simply entrusting the work of the site to a not too responsible person.

On the Internet there was information about the person's name, his passport data, TIN, the amount of payments to the pension fund, the amount of the insurance and funded part of the pension. However, without passport details, this information was not deemed personal enough to be punished for it.

The Khamovnichesky Court of Moscow was also attacked by criminals who made public the internal correspondence of employees, opening access to the database of letters. Moreover, this was done in order to express in such an ambiguous way support for the Pussy Riot group, whose case was just heard in this court at that time. The hackers not only leaked letters from the judicial authorities to the network, but replaced them with offensive texts, calls for the release of group members and other slogans and an assessment of the work of the judicial system as a whole. All this disgrace lasted almost a day, the site did not work stably, and of course, it did not inspire confidence among the employees.

Government sites flew one after the other in 2012, including law enforcement, educational, medical, financial and other areas. 2.5 million entries from these sites that contained personal information were leaked to the Internet. The hackers immediately made themselves public, even made public the name of their group. They issued a statement that Russia has been a country of tyranny for too long, and they are trying to draw attention to the fact that while Russians are forced to work for a penny, their country has money to pay for the work of spies.

Among the data that turned out to be in the public domain were logins and passwords from personal mailboxes, including those related to government resources. Many of them have remained encrypted.

Employees of the US national archives, without any hackers, managed to open one of the most hidden folders with information about army veterans with their names, their families and addresses, as well as the campaigns in which they took part. And in the amount of 76 million pieces.

It's just that one of the hard drives on which this information was stored stopped working. The employees of the archive made a completely logical decision that it needed to be repaired and sent it off for repair. Before we saved all the data from the disk, but forgot to delete it from it. In the end, the disk was not repaired and returned back, but what happened to the closed data that left the walls of the state institution is silent.