The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Carhartt data breach affects 12.9M, half of what ShinyHunters claimed

Workwear and fashion retailer Carhartt’s data breach was about half as bad as ShinyHunters claimed, according to Troy Hunt, who reviewed the data dump before uploading it to his Have I Been Pwned website. Hunt’s HIBP service reported 12.9 million individuals affected by the alleged breach, around half of what ShinyHunters purported when it claimed to leak the company’s data earlier this month. ShinyHunters dumped what it said was 50GB worth of Carhartt’s data on August 13 after the retailer hired what the criminals called “a very unskilled and incompetent negotiator” to haggle the crooks down from their $3.3 million extortion demand. According to Hunt, ShinyHunters data was injected with millions of lines of synthetic data, substantially padding out the number of affected individuals. “You're not going to believe this, but turns out you can't always take criminals at their word,” said Hunt, before detailing the investigative process that goes into calculating the scale of breaches that make it to the HIBP site. Hunt usually starts with HIBP's open-source email address extractor, which spat out nearly 25 million addresses, before running it through OpenClaw to analyze the contents further and sift through the mass of information, looking for anomalies. For a retailer, the AI thought that the millions of .edu and .org email domains looked off - like signs of TPC-DS synthetic data injection. Examples included michael.ware@c.edu and michelle.larue@lkvb06fkzsjv.org. The first and last names look real, but a common finding among TPC-DS-generated data is that it will use completely random strings for domains. A manual look at the data points with which these email addresses were associated further revealed these "individuals" were located in countries, such as Benin, which don’t represent dominant Carhartt markets. Further, the AI found more customers registered in Montenegro than in the US, where Carhartt is headquartered. It also found a suspiciously large proportion of customers with birth dates set in the early 1900s – unlikely given the company’s clientele is more hipster-oriented than than blue-collar nowadays. Hacking away at all the clearly bogus data, OpenClaw dropped the estimated number of genuine individuals among the data trove from 24.8 million to 13.6 million. Hunt carried on eliminating suspicious findings he noticed, such as Microsoft 365 duplicate email addresses and addresses marked for deactivation, as well as prompting OpenClaw to continue doing the same. He finally arrived at 12,933,413 accounts believed to be genuine among the ShinyHunters-leaked dataset. That’s the number that made it to the HIBP platform, which states that 83 percent of these were already gathered up in previous breaches. The moral of the story is, as Hunt says, to “take headline numbers with a grain of salt unless you're confident in the processes of those making the claims." And until trustworthy sources do the arduous work, stop treating the word of cybercriminals as gospel. The real data contains names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. Carhartt did not respond to our request for comment on Hunt’s findings. The company is yet to comment on the breach anywhere publicly. ®

The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

South African police arrest two Thai men for allegedly smuggling parrot eggs

Bird eggs intercepted in homemade incubators at Johannesburg airport as officials try to halt wildlife trafficking

South African police have arrested two Thai nationals in separate incidents for allegedly attempting to smuggle endangered parrot eggs out of the country as authorities try to stem the tide of wildlife trafficking.

A 50-year-old Thai national was arrested at OR Tambo international airport in Johannesburg on 20 August, carrying 50 bird eggs in a homemade incubator in a hand-luggage bag, South Africa’s environment ministry said in a statement.

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Stuck bundts? You need ‘cake goop’: Natalie Paull’s lime and yoghurt bundt – recipe

The cookbook author and owner of Melbourne’s Beatrix Bakes shares a her ‘100% reliable’ formula for freeing bundts from tins

When all the layer cakes are baked and iced, I will always love a slice of pretty patterned bundt. Especially one that is lightened with the perfect amount of baking powder (overly dense bundts are stodgy sadness) and brightened with limes and yoghurt.

Cake goop – a mix of flour, oil and butter – is a gift of guaranteed cake release that I found on the internet, and it means no more stuck bundts. Bless the baker who invented it! Goop has it all – release, plus enough sticking power to hold the batter as it rises and cools, without slumping. Additionally, mixing the flour with oil means you don’t get that fine, white, dusty crust on the outside of the cooked cake. Goop is 100% reliable with a 100% untarnished release record in my kitchen.

This is an edited extract from Sweet Heart by Natalie Paull, with photography by Rochelle Eagle, available in Australia 1 September through Murdoch Books, $49.99

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‘Pack of lies’: Robert Jenrick launches personal attack on Kemi Badenoch

Reform MP seeks to heap pressure on Tory leader amid confusion around details of meeting with Giorgia Meloni

Robert Jenrick has accused Kemi Badenoch of telling “a pack of lies” about her meeting with the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, as he launched a deeply personal attack on his former boss.

The Reform UK MP sought to heap pressure on the Conservative leader amid confusion about whether Meloni urged Badenoch at a meeting in Rome to “be her own woman” and resist doing a deal with his party.

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Andy Burnham should rip up our undemocratic first past the post system – even if some in Labour disagree | Neal Lawson

Rearguard reactionaries may try to block the idea of a national commission into proportional representation, but we should want more not less democracy

A poll in the Mail on Sunday at the end of June was remarkable. It had not just Reform as low as 21%, but also Labour and the Tories. It was remarkable because it starkly demonstrated the fragmented landscape of the UK’s electoral terrain, as well as the electoral weakness of its main players.

Polls since have varied, not least with the Burnham bounce, but this week’s YouGov voting intention figures put Reform, Labour and the Tories on 23%, 22% and 20% respectively (although it almost no longer matters which exact figure applies to which party). Add in the Greens and the Liberal Democrats on 13% apiece, the SNP dominating Scotland and Plaid Cymru Wales, then Restore UK and independent candidates and you have an unprecedented variety of options laid out before the British electorate.

Neal Lawson is director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass

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Het Amerikaanse bedrijf dat Solvinity wilde kopen, heeft het opgegeven

De relatie tussen Solvinity, het bedrijf achter DigiD, en het Amerikaanse techbedrijf Kyndryl, dat het wilde overnemen, is bekoeld. Kyndryl hoeft Solvinity niet meer te hebben, terwijl de aandeelhouders van het bedrijf nog altijd proberen het verbod op de overname van tafel te krijgen.


thexiffy

Last.fm last recent tracks from thexiffy.

Tom Meighan - Use It Or Lose It

Tom Meighan

Rijnmond - Nieuws

Het laatste nieuws van vandaag over Rotterdam, Feyenoord, het verkeer en het weer in de regio Rijnmond

OM eist vijf jaar cel tegen chauffeur die 17 vreemdelingen in koelcontainer smokkelde

Het Openbaar Ministerie in Rotterdam heeft vijf jaar cel geëist tegen een vrachtwagenchauffeur die zeventien vreemdelingen heeft gesmokkeld in een koelcontainer. Onder hen waren zes kinderen, de jongste drie jaar oud.

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Boeren mogen door droogte langer mest uitrijden op grasland

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Boeren mogen door de aanhoudende droogte deze zomer twee weken langer mest uitrijden op grasland. Normaal mag dat tot eind augustus, maar landbouwminister Jaimi van Essen heeft dit verlengd tot 15 september.

Door de droogte hebben boeren weinig goed gras kunnen maaien de afgelopen maanden. Daardoor is er ook weinig hooi op voorraad voor koeien. Om de boeren een kans te geven zoveel mogelijk gras te kunnen maaien in september, mag er langer mest worden uitgereden, schrijft de D66-minister in een brief aan de Tweede Kamer.

Mest kan het gras helpen groeien, maar op droog en verdord grasland brengt het meer schade aan dan dat het helpt bij de groei van gras.

BBB-Kamerlid Caroline van der Plas had Van Essen gevraagd om de termijn op te schuiven. "Hoop dat de verlenging van de mestuitrijperiode enig soelaas brengt voor boeren en bodem", schrijft ze op X.


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