I was going to submit this as a new post, then I realized that once again, I’m pushing the stone uphill, not down.
Headculies and Turboman (that has a nice ring to it - in an Adult Swim kind of way) I agree with you both.
They can put up a million dollars to defend you. No problem if they never find anything.
I saw a post today that triggered a strong desire to ask a couple questions that have been on my mind for quite some time.
As a paying customer who has this feature enabled, I feel somewhat justified in asking about Dark Web “monitoring” and “scanning.”
A few years ago, I was fascinated by the idea that dangerous and illegal activities in the dark and vast underbelly of the interwebs were real. So I downloaded TOR, fired up a VPN, and dove into the murk.
What I found was that the information that LifeLock purports to scan is the same information that the evil blackhats sell to fund thier diabolical projects. This stolen, personal data is not in any way directly accessable, and is heavily encrypted. The evil blackhats must preserve thier product. Encryption is easy, and if deployed well, is not simply broken. In fact, one could posit that “Encryption is the cornerstone of the dark web.” B. Schneier comments that in many cases, encrypted evil sites are not decrypted, and the evil ones are caught by “following the money” since it is easier that decrypting the data on the sites themselves.
Even basic email communication is easily protected by asymmetric encryption, hiding the real-time activities of these evil characters.
So here is my question:
From a technical perspective, how is it possible for a corporate actor (such as LifeLock) to “scan” and “monitor” personal information when this information is heavily secured?
What method is used to find personal data that state actors cannot get to?
I received only one notification from LifeLock over the last three years and I laughed for an hour. It was a notification about the big LinkedIn password theft about 10 years ago. The notice said that my password “may have been compromised.” the second I knew of this I changed and hardened my LinkedIn password before I knew that LifeLock existed.
I expect to hear that Norton and LifeLock are two mutually exclusive organizations and do not share thier proprietary information with each other.
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