Companies

Your and my data is leaked left and right all the time by organizations who at the time of you entering your precious PII (or Personally Identifiable Information) solemny swear to take really good care of it. Still they fail at it. By adapting the famous speech by John F. Kennedy: "Not because it is easy, but because it is hard." Even companies whose business is information security get hacked, or mis-configure their systems or human administrators fail at a minor thing causing major disasters, causing data to leak. Because it is very very hard to protect your data. Let alone companies whose business is not information security, they simply want to conduct their business on-line and not to focus in nurturing YOUR information. When a flaw in their system or procedures is found by malicious actors, data will be leaked.

I don't think this is about to change anytime soon. Unfortunately.

Back in 2020, a site called 123RF.com was pwned. How, or by whom is irrelevant. They failed protecting MY data. More details are available in Bleeping Computer article Popular stock photo service hit by data breach, 8.3M records for sale.

As anybody can expect, there are negative effects on such leaks. Today, such negativity manifests itself in my mailbox as follows:

A company, who has nothing to do with me is sending email to my unique 123RF-dedicated address, stating my attempt to request password recovery on their on-line service has failed. Ok, intersting. Not cool. However inconvenient this is to me, I fail to find the attacker's angle on this. By sending 8.3 million password recovery attempts to a public endpoint is a far fetch. They might by shear luck get access to somebody's account on the targeted site. Most likely not. But it's worth the try as it won't cost them anything and very easy to do.

This exact same has happened to me multiple times. An example from 2018 is my blog post DocuSign hacked: Fallout of leaked E-mail addresses. Given all the time and effort I put into creating mail system where I can have unique addresses to all possible use-cases it will be easy to identify the leaking source. Me and many others thought EU's GDPR was supposed to help every single Internet user with this, but still Wired is writing in their May 2022 article How GDPR Is Failing (sorry about the paywall, I'm a subscriber).

I'd like to end this by expressing my generic despair and agony not targeted towards anybody in particular while still targeted towards all stakeholders. It's a movie quote from the original -68 Planet of the Apes where at the end of the film Charlton Heston's character understands what had happened and how he ended up in that mess:

Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!