Google caches payment card details for 19,000 Brits
Stolen info wants to be free
More evidence of Google's success in organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible: Payment card details for 19,000 Brits were recently found hosted in the search engine's web cache.
The details included the names, addresses, card numbers and expiry dates for UK-based holders of Visa, MasterCard and American Express holders, according to news reports. The information was available to anyone who knew the proper search query.
The data was originally posted to a website server located in Vietnam, presumably in error by data thieves who wanted to sell it to other scammers. Even after the site was shuttered in February, the information continued to live on in Google's web history cache until company employees finally purged it.
Many of the cards that were posted had already been canceled, a spokesman for a bank industry group said. Additional coverage is here and here. ®
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COMMENTS
So how do we check?
Google our credit card numbers?
How secure would that be?
No big deal
Really. Since the people in question have been stupid enough to post their *real* visa number rather than a one usage number like all serious banks (and certainly all in this country) provide, sometimes as a free service.
And in case the said numbers haven't been used for many weird usages already, I find it cool that Google help those morons to *really* understand they should have a clue, by pushing the numbers to world + dog.
That way, they'll learn.
Does stolen info want to be free?
I don't think so. "Info" doesn't want anything.
Rather, "Insecure information" is available to whoever wants it.
Don't blame the database ... blame the folks making it available all and sundry.
That's not Google, BTW ... that's the idiots allowing Google to index them ...
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