Threat Actor Scraped Dell Support Tickets, Including Customer Phone Numbers

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch reported Tuesday. From the report: The newly compromised data includes names, phone numbers and email addresses of Dell customers. This personal data is contained in customer "service reports," which also include information on replacement hardware and parts, comments from on-site engineers, dispatch numbers, and in some cases diagnostic logs uploaded from the customer's computer.

Several reports seen by TechCrunch contain pictures apparently taken by customers and uploaded to Dell for seeking technical support. Some of these pictures contain metadata revealing the precise GPS coordinates of the location where the customer took the photos, according to a sample of the scraped data obtained by TechCrunch.

Threat Actor?

[alvinrod]

Can we just say hacker? Threat actor just reminds me of George Carlin's but on soft language [youtube.com].

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

I agree, a threat actor is more of a theoretical entity used in planning. In this case it's something that actually happened, so it seems weird to use that very non-specific term.

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[ArchieBunker]

Lawyers have been advising cops on the terminology to use when speaking to the public. A suspect is a "person of interest" when they're looking for him or when describing the event it was done by an "actor".

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[alvinrod]

Sounds like another case of the euphemism treadmill. What's wrong with "suspect"? You even had to use the word yourself in order to tell everyone what you actually meant because the bullshit term is elusive in meaning by design. Okay, maybe not everyone the police are interested in is suspected of the crime, but we have witnesses, accomplices, and plenty of other descriptive words that work perfectly well. These aren't CEOs that need to find a way to massage a disastrous quarter or doctors who have to break

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[newbie_fantod]

I remember when calling a cracker a hacker was an express ticket to a -1 comment rating on /.

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[backslashdot]

Yeah I was wondering who it was and if I could get him to act in the next movie I'm producing.

They can't do any worse than Dell did.

[Seven Spirals]

Dell salespeople were reaching out all the time through email and snail mail. If I effectively ignored them into oblivion why would some ereet haxx0r be any better at getting my attention with some made up 419-style drama? They can both go fuck themselves. My address is already for sale in many hacks and leaks if "have I been pwned" is at all accurate. I double dog dare them to show up here in person, too. I wish they would.

Ignoring Basic DB Safety

[BoRegardless]

We've had a decade of huge DB access by both foreign nations and hackers of all types.

So why aren't these large company systems locked down with advances multi-factor authorization & constant monitoring to detect scraping?

Their business depends on their data, yet every week it is that same story over again.

Could it be CEO emphasis on next quarter's profits are more important than the business data safety costs?

multi-factor authorization and subcontractor can

[Joe_Dragon]

multi-factor authorization and subcontractor can be an issue.

Even more so if subcontractor need to use an dell phone as then dell may have to pay for that.

Re:

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

I know you are speaking rhetorically, but all the same, this behaviour will continue because there are no consequences (for them, anyway) for their actions.

The EU's GDPR might change minds

[Bruce66423]

In theory a careless release of data could get a fine measured as a percentage of global turnover. Here's hoping it happens soon.

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[Bert64]

Well their support agents need to be able to read the tickets, so even if they are stored encrypted-at-rest the support system needs to be able to decrypt the data in order to display it to the agents so if someone compromised the support system they get access to the unencrypted data and/or the decryption keys, whereas if they stole the physical drive or gained access to the backups the data should be encrypted and unreadable.

Encryption is not a magic bullet, limitations and use cases need to be considered

Good news, everyone!

[sunderland56]

Finally, finally, SOMEONE is reading Dell support tickets.

India

[groobly]

Dell support as far as I can tell is based in India. India has low incomes but a lot of highly motivated entrepeneurs.