alt Hacker NewsBrazil's Caixa insurer breach exposes names and tax IDs of all 7.6M customers
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I'm pretty sure at this point every tax ID (CPF) in Brazil is available on a database you can get on the dark web.
We've had a "CPF-ication" of everything in Brazil over the last few years. The vast majority of people have shared this number with their local grocery store, pharmacy, gym, etc. It's required for a lot of stuff and pretty necessary for others.
Given that, if that's all that leaked here that's a pretty good outcome. It's sad that I think like this but it's kind of how it is.
What makes me more pessimistic is that they claim no financial data was exposed but I wonder if that's really true. And that's where the gold is because then scammers know who to target.
Small potatoes. CPFs have been leaked so many times in Brazil that probably all of them are already out there. [0][1][2]
[0] https://cyberbrics.info/the-largest-personal-data-leakage-in...
[1] https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/massiv...
[2] https://www.lumiun.com/blog/en/data-breach-in-brazil-the-wor...
Oof. There's a Catalan bank/insurer called la caixa as well, i thought for a moment it was the same company. But appears not.
It's important to note the Brazilian tax id (CPF) is not meant to be a well kept secret like the American SSN
I find it both a nerve wrecking and interesting thought experiment to assume that all data is going to leak. Could we go through this and get out alive? And, if so, what would the world look like after? It's not at all clear to me it must be worse.
The attacks started hitting Brazil, and it'll be really bad! Multiple people that uses Caixa (in general) aren't tech savvy and could be caught by fraudsters more easily.
> covers all of its 7.6 million active
How dystopian is it to find reassuring in this situation that a customer doesn't have to wonder whether their data was leaked because it's "all"?
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No financial information leaked, just tax id, which in Brazil nowadays doesn't mean much. There have been more than one high profile website in the past reportedly selling personal data, including tax identifier (CPF), for essentially any Brazilian citizen.
It is common to be asked for your CPF for trivial things like purchasing anything on a drugstore, and for any and all activity with government branches or banking. This combined with several breaches in government and private institutions in Brazil over the years has made this information essentially public.
More concerning is when more private information is leaked. For example, police security camera live feed and license plate or CPF-based tracking of anyone was sold online in the past, and has been used by criminal gangs in an attempted murder of a judge: https://www.poder360.com.br/justica/pcc-tinha-acesso-a-siste...
This highlights the importance of reducing the amount of data collected, but in Brazil and the rest of the world, both governments and private institutions have pushed for the contrary, more so in recent years.