Hackers stole information of 29.8M accounts (~20% of users). SoundCloud is downplaying the data beyond email address as "publicly available", but the data wasn't scraped. "Profile statistics" aren't public either. Their main response[0], seems to focus on passwords and payment details being the only risky data. They even imply email addresses are public.
> no sensitive data was taken in the incident.The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles (not financial or password data)
Maybe the two public data points weren't connected before?
I don't use SoundCloud, but if profiles didn't have contact information like Email Address on them then it could be meaningful to now connect those two dots.
Like, 'Hey look, Person A, who is known to use email address X, kept Lost Prophets as one of their liked artists even after 2013!'
SoundCloud is a weird place, people in entertainment have certain strong incentives. They figured out who I am, figured out all the email addresses I have, jacked the account attached to my SoundCloud, stole my account. I still to this day, don't know how they pwned my email (tfa was on but it didn't trigger suspicious activity it let them login without triggering it, no clue how they got the password either and the password is secure enough that it's too hard to brute force, and it's not in a pwned db). Based on what was in my soundcloud inbox when I got access again, someone paid a fair amount to have this done... and now I have to go change my email again I suppose.
You are 100% correct based on article. Not good that you're gray, and your parent of "who cares it was already available and scraped" is the top comment.
But, why care? (Yes, we can “care” that there was a leak - but… why worry? what new risk exists today that didn’t yesterday?)
The data in the leak (other than follower count, etc) was already available for purchase from Zoominfo, 8sense, or a variety of other data brokers or other legal marketplaces for PII.
I suppose the risk now is that the data is freely available and no longer behind a data broker’s paywall?
Let's say you have a $SOCIETAL_TABOO streak and let it out via a soundcloud account that isn't identifiable as you without your email.
Now it is.
Now I can blackmail you or haunt you.
(I'm sure there's other examples, tl;dr people are deanonymized, there are uncountable reasons why people choose anonymity)
> The data in the leak (other than follower count, etc) was already available for purchase from Zoominfo, 8sense, or a variety of other data brokers or other legal marketplaces for PII.
Seems that bcrypt, scrypt and Argon2 are all designed to slowdown attacks on specific hardware platforms. All run relatively slow on GPUs so they all work. The blog covers how to overcome this using FPGAs, specifically for bcrypt. The same might also work against scrypt and Argon2 if configured parameters are in favor of FPGAs. If parameters exceed the specs of FPGAs, they will be slow as well. So depends on the configuration of the algorithm.
I guess he's feeling the heat of sites that do more than parsing emails from SPAM lists. These sites include full cracked passwords, HIBP 2.0, see e.g. https://scatteredsecrets.com/.
So they've scraped public data. Why care?