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tmalylast Thursday at 4:47 PM1 replyview on HN

Assuming they have a read only copy to the data, how would having access to just data require rebuilding the systems?


Replies

kevingaddlast Thursday at 6:07 PM

It's common for stray passwords or authentication tokens to be found in data dumps of i.e. someone's email, dropbox, or whatnot. So getting read only access to all the data in a given agency means you probably have access to a trove of stray passwords and authentication tokens that can be used to pivot into write access there or somewhere else.

As a concrete example, if you have read-only access to someone's email inbox that's enough to steal most of their accounts on other services since you can request a password reset link and then click on it.