Ah, my beautiful, smart friends, it is breakfast time, and today I have another delightful edition of “How the Internet Keeps Getting Better by Completely Farkin’ Us Over”, and today’s episode is starring the mother of all data leaks, because privacy is nothing more than a social construct invented by paranoid people who want boring lives.

So, what happened? Tell me!

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Some bright sparks at Cybernews (who probably never sleep because they’re snorting crystal meth, just kidding, don’t sue me) they teamed up with the ever-vigilant data hunter over at SecurityDiscovery, and together, they stumbled upon a 631-gigabyte goldmine of information that was casually lounging around somewhere online in da deep weeb, without a password, because passwords are clearly passé in this era of AI-driven incompetence.

Four billion friggin’ records.

Four billion!

And what did it contain? Oh, just a little something for everyone under the christmas tree. It was a buffet of your most intimate details like your full name, your date of birth, phone numbers, financial data including your cards, debt and saving information, and all those delightful little spending habits you probably thought were your own private shame, and they were all just chilling there, exposed for the world to see.

The largest chunks seemed to be coming from WeChat with over 805 million records, and a collection of residential data with 780 million records, and a charming little treasure trove simply named “bank” with 630 million records.

Phew!

And all of our data is swimming in a glorious 631 gigabytes file of unsecured information, for anyone to grab. Now that’s enough data to know if Noel Skum prefers boxers or thongs, or to find out exactly how many cells Zucky sheds during his monthly human-skin molting ceremony. Hell, at this point, even my browser history might seem modestly quaint by comparison.

And to my surprise, most of the juicy dirt involves Chinese citizens. You know, because the Chinese government totally respects individual privacy, about as much as Tim Crook respects your right to fix your own iPhone, nicht wahr?

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The researchers suspect that it was all out there for surveillance, a magnificent effort to compile comprehensive profiles, given that knowing your precise spending habits, your crippling credit card debt, and how much you’ve spent on organic quinoa salads offers a truly granular look into your daily existence, and allows for the creation of behavioral patterns that are more revealing than a forced confession in church.

And if you think otherwise, you’re either incredibly naive or blissfully unaware of how the world truly works, my beautiful smart friend.

The researchers put it rather eloquently: the database was a “meticulously gathered and maintained” collection.

Lemme mainsplain this: “these bastards have been spying on you harder than Bozo the Benevolent watches his warehouse workers”.

“What about all the safeguards?”, I can hear you ask innocently.

“Safeguards” researchers laugh bitterly, because that’s a word declared verboten by the Grammar Gestapo ages ago.

So the biggest chunk of data was harvested from WeChat (also known as WhatsApp’s totally ‘harmless’ cousin), with 805 million records. That’s like the population of Europe plus half a Canada’s worth of humans just tossed online.

But, of course, it’s China, so who’s counting?

The next largest set was residential data, complete with handy geographical identifiers to find your home, probably useful for sending targeted ads, like around 780 million entries. And coming in third, the “bank” category, which definitely doesn’t sound shady at all, nope, nothing suspicious there, with a sloppy 630 million records containing financial info, personal info, and God knows what else.

“The sheer volume and diversity of data types,” they said, “suggests this was likely a centralized aggregation point”. Translation for simpletons (but smart simpletons): “This farkin’ monstrosity makes Google’s data scraping look like a polite telemarketer confirming your street address”.

And don’t worry, my gorgeous geeks and genius freaks, because the database was “quickly taken down” once it was discovered, and that means it is probably only been open long enough for literally everyone who ever wanted to commit identity theft, blackmail, fraud, or just good old-fashioned social engineering, to download their very own private copy of it.

But hey, it’s only 4 billion records.

Barely more than the National Public Data breach, which, by the way, was already the internet equivalent of forgetting your trousers at home during a Zoom call.

Well, the good thing about this lil ‘mishap’ is that maybe next time we’ll just write our PIN codes on billboards and wear T-shirts saying “Please hack me, daddy” and be done with it, because the concept of online security is just too complicated for humanity to grasp.

Bis später, mes petits génies!

Signing off,

Marco

I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s PR nightmare.

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