Hackers who stole millions of crime tip records now selling them, claim they “need to eat”
Hackers who shared millions of stolen anonymous tips submitted by Crime Stoppers informants with select journalists and researchers are now selling the huge data cache. Apparently, they need the money for food.
The breach of the cloud-based tip and intelligence management company P3 Global Intel, used to share information with Crime Stoppers programs, was announced a month ago.
A massive 91.53GB dataset, dubbed BlueLeaks 2.0, was then made available to journalists and researchers by transparency collective DDoSecrets. The latter got those 8.3 million crime tip records from a hacker group known as the Internet Yiff Machine.
The P3 platform is advertised as an anonymous way to share information with Crime Stoppers programs, law enforcement entities, schools, and large corporations worldwide.
But the leak shattered the illusion of anonymity. DDoSecrets said that while P3 claims the communications on the system are encrypted, the data was actually retrieved in plaintext.
Emma Best, an American investigative journalist and whistleblower, a cofounder of DDoSecrets, released a statement claiming that BlueLeaks 2.0 provides “excruciating detail on the Orwellian Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) and tip collection systems that seek to make everyone an informant.”
Now, though, there’s a need to speak about actual danger to all those informants: the hackers are selling the data cache for $10,000 in cryptocurrency.
After all, even though the leak mostly exposed extensive personal data on people accused by tipsters: names, email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, home addresses, license plate numbers, Social Security numbers, and criminal histories, in some instances, it included details about the informants.
And the informants may be vulnerable to retribution by people they turned in to authorities. The Cybernews research team had previously warned that a leak like this could be extremely sensitive.
“If anonymous tips can be traced back to individuals, via e.g., device metadata or other data available, this increases safety risks for informants,” our researchers said.
“Besides, this leak could expose accusations that are not yet fully proven, which could cause harassment of potentially innocent people, and reputational harm in general.”
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Why the change of heart? Why are the hackers now selling the data, even though just weeks ago they very deliberately shared the cache with a transparency platform? Desperation is the answer.
“It’s truly not something I want to do, and it goes against my principles,” the hacker told Straight Arrow News, an outlet the data was shared with a month ago.
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“However, it was out of necessity. Principles are for the well-fed, and I’m unfortunately not in a great place.”
The hacker also confirmed that multiple parties had already expressed interest in the dataset. They assume the cache will attract customers who aim to commit fraud and extortion, or to find and target informants.
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