If you are not doing things you don’t want others to know about, perhaps you don’t care who knows what porn you’re into, maybe caring is a waste of energy.

Can a Chinese firm buy your information? If so, you are both missing out on cheap stickers and creating value for the firm that sells that data. You’ve just essentially raised the value of collecting your data in the states, ensuring it will intensify.

[–] Lemongrab@lemmy.one 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

These are not targeted attacks. Since they are en mass, they dont increase the worth of your data any no one cares about you in particular.

The same is true for cyberattacks. They are done automatically against targets with suseptability to attacks, which could be lots of personal data or known to not check the validity of the services they trust.

From there it is simple for a hacker to either purchase data from a scammer or attack a service with weak security (like the random dropship spam shop that you have also trusted with your financial data).

TLDR: Protecting yourself doesnt make your data doesnt make it worth more unless you are already a target. In fact, your data is worth more because you show others that you are vulnerable. Trusting a 3rd party with your financial data means trusting that they put the effort to protect against hackers that could compromise the service.

[–] MrMamiya@feddit.de 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Are you suggesting to me that a drop shipper having my fake Apple Pay card number will get breached and a hacker will take the time to reverse engineer that fake data to crack apples algorithm

Or is reality more like they’re gonna buy a data file and use the cards they can crack immediately?

[–] Lemongrab@lemmy.one 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Not just financial, but your physical address (unless you are using a po box, which can still be correlated to you), ip, approx location, local devices, phone unique identifier, browsing habits. I am not going to try and name all the kinds of data collectable, but it is trivial to use data related to your device to hack it.

For your question, most likely if you are not a person of interest then attacks wont be specific to you but against a group. So for the hacker, attacking a wildly popular app to extract the info already available is bettee than individually cracking whatever algorithm was used to hash specific data (unless they already have a piece of it).

An example: A hacker tricks an employee into getting username and password (realistically trivial). They spread their influence till they reach an individual with system privelege. They use the private keys they obtain to decrypt financial and account data. The company doesnt even know they are compromised (often takes them months). Now they have two oppertunities. They can sell the cards in bulk on the black market and sell/use all the data harvested by this invassive app. People make mistakes and with a list of emails they can phish the shit out of everyone using the official corp. templates.

Your data isnt just at risk to the first party who collected it, but also 3rd parties who obtain it, legit or otherwise.

[–] Lemongrab@lemmy.one 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I hope that makes sense. Let me know if there is anything needing clarification.

[–] MrMamiya@feddit.de 2 points 11 months ago

Interesting. Did you know you can find my address by looking up property records? It’s free, anyone can do it. You can see how much my house cost, how much taxes I pay, etc.

Did you know you could look up Name, Phone Number, Address, Criminal History, Convictions, and Court Cases involving the individual searched using a license plate number?

I really do appreciate the explanation. I really don’t feel scared. For what it’s worth I used hide my email and a vpn. I guess if I am ever important I will have to consider more. As it stands, everyone already knows what I’m up to, I use google services.

Equifax. I know you know what I’m talking about. Why should I give a shit if I’m gonna be exposed by the stewards supposedly safeguarding my most sensitive info anyway?