WOOPS… MAYBE THOSE DIGITAL IDs AREN’T SO SECURE…

[EndtheMadnessNow]

My trust level just keeps falling lower & lower.

November 12, 2025 / Joseph P. Farrell

Well, we were warned, by none other than the former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts: "There is no cyber-system that is secure," an aphorism that, with time, I expect to find in collections of such aphorisms like the Analects of Confucius: priceless wisdom for the times. My philosophical turn of mind is prompted by the following important article that was shared by M.D. (with our gratitude):

India's biggest data breach? Hacking gang claims to have stolen 815 million people's personal information

Now, in case you did not know, India is one of those countries more or less on board with the moves toward an all-digital society, including for things like personal documentation, and money (in the form of so-called "digital currency", which, as Fitts, I, and many others have noted, is not a currency at all, but a corporate coupon whose "value" can be adjusted to your "social performance", i.e., your conformity to the wishes, desires, and agendas of oligarchs and plutocrats).

So when India, whose population is a little over one billion has the personal information of 815 million of that billion - a substantial majority - stolen, then you know you have a teensy-tiny little problem on your hands:

The news of what is claimed to be such a significant data leak couldn't come at a worse time for the Indian authorities.

In September, security researcher Sourajeet Majumder uncovered a vulnerability on an Indian government website that had unwittingly leaked documents which included Aadhaar numbers, identity card details and even copies of residents' fingerprints.

By mid-October the website flaw had been fixed, thanks to Majumder's responsible disclosure. But it is, of course, possible that fraudsters and online criminals had been able to exploit it for nefarious purposes beforehand.

If data breaches like these keep happening, it's understandable why many people will feel increasingly reluctant to trust the authorities with their personally identifiable and biometric data.

You can change a password, and you can change your bank account. Hey, you can even change your name if you really feel you have to. But good luck changing your fingerprints.

In other words, if one can hack the unhackable "wallets" behind klepto-currencies (as has been done), and any digital database whatsoever, one can hack those digital IDs as well. (And, bad news, there are ways of concealing or even "changing" your fingerprints, too.)

And of course, if one can hack those things, then one can hack bank accounts, particularly if those accounts are full of nothing but digital currency.

And all of that introduces a measure of risk and instability into the financial markets (it's called volatility by the finance wonks, but perhaps a better analogy would be "California brush fire").

But the article raises an intriguing possibility for high octane speculation, and regular readers here know all-too-well that I simply cannot resist a run to the end of the speculation twig and a Wile E. Coyote nosedive into the canyon of speculation below. That possibility was raised in my mind by the following statement, italicized in the quotation above: "If data breaches like these keep happening, it's understandable why many people will feel increasingly reluctant to trust the authorities with their personally identifiable and biometric data."

Ya think?

Seriously, though, the speculation is simple: what if there is a group of computer nerds spread around the world, who see the looming crisis that this move to an all-digital financial-surveillance system entails, and are trying to wake people up, and simultaneously, fight "delaying actions" by such means? It may not be as goofy as it sounds. After all, the idea of such "cyber-warfare" has been around for a long time, even being popularized by the 1984 fiction novel Softwar. It became a reality during the infamous "Farewell" spy case, when a French government mole inside the KGB helped the Soviet Union "steal" software that had a back door planted into it by Western intelligence and software experts, who used it to create a gas pipeline explosion in the Soviet Union,  critically wounding the Soviet economy. (The resulting explosion was visible from space.) More recently, we have seen the computer hacking group Anonymous, and now a similar group active in India. Finally, we know various nations - China, Russia, and the USA among them - have whole covert divisions of government working on cyber warfare. And in countries pondering moves to more and more digital "currency", "equities" and so on, those cyber warfare departments can quickly become economic warfare components, as nations compete to develop various nasty means of disrupting their adversaries' economies, including outright theft and distribution of assets before the victim has time to react.

We'll know when we wake up to the headlines "Bank of International Settlements Accounts Hacked; Authorities in Search for Culprits."

Permit me to utter those four wonderful words: "We told you so!"

Time to butter the popcorn... Sleep well, Mr. Carstens...

See you on the flip side...

Published in 1986 in English.

Hmmmm...


4 things to know about Thierry Breton

[Ninurta]

No!

Say it ain't so!

Anything digital can be digitally hacked?

Who knew?

Hint: anyone with any computer knowledge knew, or at the very least had no excuse for not knowing.

These folks come up with the goofiest schemes, and then sell unsuspecting - and utterly in the dark, unknowing - decision makers on how safe and secure their particular "solution" is, and the decision makers eat that crap up.

Recent examples of just such pie-in-the-sky schemes:

1) that goofy chip they put in credit/debit cards to "enhance security". They don't. At all. They're just a useless expense that is designed to make a consumer feel more secure when he or she isn't... the chips never come into play at all in online transactions, and as for POS terminal transactions, I can drop my card on the way out of a store, and the next person going in can find it, take it inside, and clean all the money off of it - the chip is right there with them the whole time! How in the hell does that make ANYTHING more secure? Those chips are designed for one thing only - to make money for the people who make and sell the chips to companies that apparently don't know any better than to buy them.

Those chips work on the same principles that those "security cards" that you used to have to put in a satellite receiver to "decode" the signals worked on. The chips even look the same. Back in the day, I knew a guy who made a decent living programming and reprogramming those satellite "security" cards. Folks would buy the lowest tier programming, then take their cards to Spany who would reprogram them, and presto! They could watch anything the wanted to.

So then the satellite companies started sending "fry" signals to fry hacked cards. No problem - Spanky would just reprogram them for 20 bucks, and the viewer was back in business.

He even had an old computer at his shop that he paid about 30 bucks for. It didn't even have a hard drive... but it ran a program that would "unlock" all the satellite channels on the fly. If they sent a "fry" signal to it, all he had to do was re-boot, and he was back in business.

"Security" chips my ass! Spanky did about 4 years in the Federal pokey over his hacking activities, but when he got out, he had a nice nest egg waiting for him all the same from those activities.

2) "unhackable" digital ID's that apparently (see OP) turned out to be extremely hackable.

3) "unhackable" crypto "currency", that also turns out to be very hackable, not to mention vanishes into nothingness if you get a transaction just a little bit wrong. See, if I have cash in my pocket, and it "vanishes" between my hand and the cashier's hand, I know who I'm gonna punch in the face. Not so easy when you're dealing with fake "cryptocurrencies". They just vanish, and are never seen again. Anywhere. it's as if they never existed... which, really, they didn't.

There is nothing digital that is un-hackable. The best you can hope to do is make it more costly to hack, but a determined hacker will be able to get around it, no matter what you do.

Welcome to the Digital Age.



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