Microsoft Restores Player's 25-Year-Old Account After Nuking It Due to Hacker (ign.com) 42
Microsoft restored streamer Joshua Khane's 25-year-old Xbox and OneDrive account after it was compromised by a hacker and then suspended, putting years of personal data, baby photos, and thousands of dollars in games at risk. IGN reports: While he was "extremely happy" and thanked Microsoft for its help recovering his account and all the invaluable information therein, he levied some criticisms toward the brand for its initial response, claiming it had told him the suspension was "irreversible" at first. "It's unfortunate that such a big company can bring back your account if you ask them to," he said. "The way it all went, to me, is a little bit shady, because it's not that they can't bring back your account -- they won't bring back your account if you're a nobody."
Khane credited the community for making his story go viral and bringing it to Microsoft's attention, but felt that without their help, he would have been up a creek without a paddle. He also tied the situation to the growing conversation surrounding digital ownership, comparing it to Sony's decision to stop printing physical game discs starting January 2028.
Khane credited the community for making his story go viral and bringing it to Microsoft's attention, but felt that without their help, he would have been up a creek without a paddle. He also tied the situation to the growing conversation surrounding digital ownership, comparing it to Sony's decision to stop printing physical game discs starting January 2028.
Reversible Irreversible ? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it was reversible, why telling him it was irreversible ?
All this over 25 years ???
We already knew, but it's better to say it again : M$, in "personnal data", there is "personnal". That means "not yours". And if I could, I'd make you pay $1000 per byte of these data you steal.
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They probably need to keep the data around for a while, for legal reasons. They might get sued, and if it was deleted it will be worse for them. They might get a law enforcement request for the data, and it would look bad if they deleted it.
The bigger issue is that unless you get lucky and go viral, there is no way to get this kind of thing resolved and all you can do is sue to get your costs covered.
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That's not for you with your complete lack of knowledge on the matter to decide. If they suspended the account due to detecting some illegal activity they would need to keep it. If they suspended it as part of an identified hacking campaign they'd need to keep it. If it was part of an ongoing internal investigation, part of an ongoing external law enforcement investigation (Microsoft does work with police when it comes to hacking groups) then they'd need to keep it.
There's a multitude of reasons both legal
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That is both completely false and irrelevant.
Completely False:
Knowingly destroying evidence you know to be incriminating even before receiving a legal order to do so is criminally punishable, not just for a NSL but for any legal proceeding. It falls under obstruction of justice laws federally. Heck there's a whole field of law dedicated to this topic and it even has a name: Spoilation. Many states have state based spoilation laws on this as well. If you're really lucky you'll be in a civil trial and will ju
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As long as there is no request to keep the data yet, they can delete it.
Even GP knows more about this than you do. If you have reason to believe law enforcement may request the data, then it's illegal to delete the data.
But when the NSL arrives, you better already have deleted the data, because if they catch you deleting it afterward you're having a problem.
If an NSL arrives, you've either got other problems, or you've already agreed to assist the feds in spying like Microsoft did long, long ago, and the NSL is a legal cover for your actions which will prevent you from ever having to testify about them in court, with the excuse of national security as a cover. You don't have the slightest clue, which explains why y
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They plain lied. It wasn't irrecoverable at all. This is, of course, standard practise (policy) with all companies. Lie first, then offer a more expensive alternative.
Politicians are squeaky clean in comparison.
Indeed. (Score:2)
Lessons to be learned here include:
1. Don't store important things in any cloud storage, it might all be lost at any moment for reasons beyond your control. Use a different backup strategy.
2. Don't store sensitive or embarrassing things in cloud storage, it might all be hacked and stolen at any moment. Use a different storage strategy.
3. Always assume that anything you store in cloud storage is available for training by all AI models and available to every criminal organization in the world including all
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Put aside the personal data for a moment.
This also included all of the customer's Xbox digital "purchases".
Microsoft is literally known for poor security, including in their services. Azure was hacked at least twice where there are literally no logs, so Microsoft has literally no idea what was accessed.
It's unconscionable to permit Microsoft, a corporation known globally for incompetence, to cut off people's access to content they "purchased" because their account was hacked. Sure, it could be the user's fa
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Which is why, under the GDPR, they not only have to hand over copies of everything from you the have, they also have to delete it all unless they have a valid business reason that pertains to their business with you. Also funny how fast the react when you do a GDPR request. No comparison to their basically non-existent customer support. Apparently those past fines for illegal behaviour had some effect.
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It's irreversible unless you complain enough. Standard practice.
"I'm very sorry sir, that's not possible. Oh, you know so-and-so? Sure, will only be a few minutes."
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It's likely irreversible in that there wasn't a way to recover it. Chances are the only reason the data still exists is because of... backups. You know, the things companies do.
It's why things like GPDR make it hard because you can ask them to delete all your data just fine - they can delete it from the databases they have and it's irrecoverable.
But the problem is your data exists on backup tapes - likely on daily and weekly sets maintained on-prem and cycled monthly to offsite storage. Chances are there ar
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It's irreversible in that it's a pain in the ass, so they would prefer to not help.
It's reversible in that other forces (e.g. negative publicity) can be greater than the pain in the ass.
Microsoft sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
My kid lost his Minecraft account due to 'suspicious account activity' that magically registered while converting his Mojang account to a Microsoft account as they were pressuring him to do.
'Customer service' was completely unhelpful and presumably the company knows you're not going to go to the bother of taking them to court over such a small amount of money.
So congratulations, Microsoft - I pirated the game because we owned it and you were denying access. You 'win'!
It is not THE CLOUD (Score:2, Redundant)
It is not THE CLOUD, it is somebody elses computer...
Don't store personal data, baby photos on OneDrive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Don't store personal data, baby photos on OneD (Score:1)
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All backups can fail, so nobody should backup anything, ever.
You're going for sarcasm but you just hit stupid. No one suggested not to backup things, just pointing out that DVDs are not perfect. You should backup across multiple mediums which experience different failure modes which are unlikely to fail concurrently due to the same reason.
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Anything can fail, which is why the whole point of a backup is to have more than one copy in different places.
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Anything can fail, which is why the whole point of a backup is to have more than one copy in different places.
You left one out.
3, 2, 1. You got the 3, and the 1. 3 copies of your data, 1 stored in a different place ... you forgot the 2.
TWO DIFFERENT MEDIUMS.
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Thanks. English is hard when it's your 4th language.
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I run a personal server that makes nightly versioned backups of all of my OneDrive data since that is where all of my phone's camera images end up.
I maintain several e-mail accounts that are backups for each other and have as much protection as is possible to apply to them.
Seems like a no-brainer to me to back up the things that you care about and not to rely 100% on any one provider, no matter how big.
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newsflash: DVD's WILL fail at some point too...
If the data is truly valuable to you, you will have multiple copies, and you will TEST the backups to ensure they are working
Well duh (Score:2)
they won't bring back your account if you're a nobody.
Well yeah. I mean come on we know about IT stuff around here. If you are trying to back up vary large transnational systems two axis on the chart or granularity, and cost on the operational side, and granularity and time to restore on the recovery side. Sometimes you can mix them, ie a not vary granular operational backup, but if you are willing to put enough time an engery you can restore individual records or groups there of by say restoring a whole partition (as in database) querying the data you need a
Sports Fans (Score:1)
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And this, right here, sports fans, is why one never, ever, keeps information online as ones sole repository. Buy a bloody archive drive or two. Better yet, but together a data server from old hardware you have at home! As to games, the demise of physical media is lamented.
Aside from Onedrive, there are people out there who "store" all their photos on Facebook. Then they wonder why they are all messed up when they want to say, make a print. For myself, I have a couple Time Machine backups, so even if one of the drives fails, I have the other, backups of backups.
Microsoft is too big to fail (Score:3)
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You don't need anti-debanking style laws. But you do need a right to access the things you store and paid for. If Microsoft wants to cancel your account they should be forced to provide you the ability to download your entire OneDrive and transfer it elsewhere, and send out physical copies of any game you purchased. I don't support forcing businesses to do business with all customers, but equally all accounts should be subject to mandatory transition.
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And apparently some completely incompetent morons even think that is ok and mod my comment down. Stupid and proud of it, apparently.
This is a pretty typical response (Score:2)
It's one of the reasons I would never want to be a youtuber. You have constant griefers, grifters and trolls trying to either hack your account and stealit or doing constant illegal and fraudulent copyright claims to get your cha
slow news day already? (Score:2)
nobody cares what happens to youtubers accounts. this kind of thing happens all the time (as explained may times above).