Feds Seize WeLeakInfo.com For Selling Access To Stolen Data

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from PC Magazine: The FBI has shut down a website that offered hackers easy access to 12 billion records stolen in thousands of data breaches. On Thursday, the Justice Department announced it had seized the internet domain to WeLeakInfo.com, a site that was cataloging data taken from more than 10,300 data breaches at various companies and websites over the years. Customers could pay as little as $2 to gain access to the massive trove of data, which was carefully indexed and searchable. In return, subscribers could look up a person's email address to find out what previously leaked passwords, names, phone numbers, and IP addresses had been associated with it. It isn't entirely clear how WeLeakInfo.com was obtaining the data breach records. But hackers routinely sell, trade, and collect such information on dark web marketplaces and forums.

GDPR

[Arthur, KBE]

How much do they owe?

Damn commies!

[fbobraga]

Chinese "hackers" (not "crackers"), right?

Re: Selling Access To Stolen Data

[djsnznxhchdn]

Selling stolen property isnâ(TM)t protected speech.

Re:

[classiclantern]

I don't see why this isn't a service. This website (haveibeenpwned.com) has all the same data but I guess it's okay with the Feds because they pay their taxes.

Re:

[guruevi]

As far as I know, haveibeenpwned.com doesn't sell or reveal the information, it just confirms that you're in the database. This website simply sold the information for a couple of dimes.

Did they finally find the Equifax data, then?

[Rick Schumann]

It still hasn't turned up even after all this time.

Planning Failure

[AlanObject]

So what state of mind do you have to be in to open a web site like this and think that the Feds wouldn't shut it down?

Re:

[dargaud]

Depends... How much money did they make before it was shut down, and is the money safely tucked away offshore, and are you yourself out of the US ? That doesn't excuse it of course...

wayback

[jmccue]

for laughs I went to the wayback and I saw this, interesting.

Make sure you're secure by searching through our 12,060,796,599 records! We have a total of 9,664 data breaches indexed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

Idiotic precedent, attacks Internet freedom

[weev88]

This seizure and corresponding arrests (one in Ireland, and one in the Netherlands) is a dangerous threat to liberty. WeLeakInfo was used by tons of legitimate security professionals. Once data is in the public domain, putting a search frontend on it should not be punished as a crime. Plenty of analysis of breach data has been done in public. [wpengine.com] Roger Grimes at CSO magazine openly admitted to trafficking 2GB of stolen password hashes to famed cryptographer Bruce Schneier [csoonline.com] -- the latter did a public analysis of

What about the ones that leaked the data?

[ObliviousGnat]

Shut down the web sites that leaked the data in the first place. There need to be real penalties for not taking our privacy seriously.

Also, selling our data to third parties ought to be opt-in or prohibited entirely, not opt-out, but now I'm just dreaming.

Seized the domain, or the servers?

[BAReFO0t]

You know those two are not the same, right?

Or do you develop government "website blockers" for a living? :P