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Comment by ashishb | Hacker News Reader

Private data is a toxic asset. Businesses should learn to purge it regularly to minimize such damages.

There should be strict laws around collecting the data in the first place. Only minimal, absolutely needed data should be collected.

I remember shopping at a well known, large electronics store in NY. The cashier insisted on taking down my phone number and email. When I asked why, he said "if you decide to return the items". I told him I will produce the receipt, but this turned into an argument. I didn't want to waste other people's time over a 30$ purchase, so I just left without buying. This is just a small example of the abuse that we put up with everyday

One would think that if anyone had seen enough breasts, it would have been a plastic surgeon. Maybe they preserved these images for use in malpractice suits, but that's not a reason to keep the images online.

Yes, insurance, malpractice. I talked to a friend who is CTO in a private hospital that has a clinic for plastic surgeries (but mostly for non-vanity purposes aka burns, acid attacks, etc.). One main reason for the pre-during-post photos is for medical studies, progress monitoring, training, etc. They keep these photos on a server on a separate network (and photos are not accesible to the typical workstation, but on locked-down ipads).

For the famous people, it's a 'nice' extortion, for some 'glossy magazine babe' who claims she is all natural, to come up with evidence of implants, etc. would be devastating to her number of followers, and thus sponsors/payments.

If the data is sensitive, keeping it on a locked down iPad is nowhere near enough to protect it. I can understand if they're using the images for machine learning or something, but if it's truly just to prevent future malpractice, data like this should only be kept on air-gapped systems or offline media.

That said, let's hope we're beyond the point of anyone caring about pictures of the human body or whether someone's had plastic surgery.

If I were threatened with something like this, which could be pretty embarrassing since I lost so much weight and have loose skin, I'd tell the hackers that I'll release even more if they leak mine and then attempt to find dirt on them.

Post-Solarwinds, hopefully people will wake up to your point - any online device using components and softwares from complex supply chains isn't good enough. Heck, Intel, Microsoft and Cisco were breached through that, and that covers a very significant portion of the supply chain of the devices and software people use today (though admittedly not for the one example of an iPad).

Even if they want to use them for ML, this shouldn't be reason to reduce the perceived sensitivity of the data to let them sit on an online device, as the harm hasn't reduced. Hopefully we'll see more threat models based on the impact of harm, not on the convenience to business.

>Heck, Intel, Microsoft and Cisco were breached through that

Anyone using Cisco could be breached by someone logging in with the default passwords Cisco keeps adding (and removing when discovered).

In most decent frameworks (NIST, COBIT, PCI-DSS) the changing of default passwords, removal of (unecessary) default accounts, and similar controls is a MUST. The network admin who doesn't do that the minute they add a new device on their network should lose their job. The companies who have IT Sec, and IT Auditors who don't check for this should also lose their jobs (or they should all get educated and keep their jobs).

These are basic stuff, a newbie IT should know these things.

I will also assume that (large) organizations test the updates, and have an action plan in place (i.e. apply fix/patch/update XYZ, study what it does, read the documentation, make the future-state-config, deploy that config, validate the config). I know, simple words, we 'all' (in the profession) know this but when you need to patch x1000, and the boss is barking.......

The specific problem on network equipment (i.e. Cisco) is actually that these "default" accounts are really backdoors, since they are not exposed in a list of accounts in the UI or shell interface.

Therefore auditors will look and find nothing, but the accounts are buried there within the system if you know about them (i.e. by exploring a firmware dump and finding the password hash and reversing it).

If they are undocumented accounts (backdoors in the devious sense) then yes, we cannot do anything about it, just try to pentest the shit out of the equip, fuzz it, and pray to our god(s) of choice and pray we get lucky in these futile experiments.

If these are documented (e.g. IBM has these notorious RedBooks of 500-700-1000 pages) then one should spend the time to study before implementing, securing, auditing, and-other-verbs.

Again, the only 'excuse' I can accept (not really) is that "management" knows that the staff is not enough and they cut corners.. in which case you crucify the COO in your report, not the poor admin(s).

>some 'glossy magazine babe' who claims she is all natural, to come up with evidence of implants, etc. would be devastating to her number of followers, and thus sponsors/payments.

Being caught in a lie about your main product being fake is a win for the public in my book.

I mean they post page after page of the before and afters on their websites, which I've always found kind of disturbing. I'm sure the women agreed to it but still kind of odd.

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