4 ms·

> Various people have reported fraudulent activity on their CCs Most likely not even related

by kbar13 14y ago

prawn 14y ago
I've seen two mentioned in each of two recent Linode threads, potentially the same people. Have there been many more?
VLM 14y ago
Well, lets think about it a bit. It turns out the numbers are ridiculously hard to find although I'm a pretty good searcher/infovore. Better info would be appreciated. Anyway the best I could find was two claims: There were 11 million american victims of identity theft in 2011 (outta 400 million) for a ratio of about 1 in 40 of the general population gets p0wned per year. Obviously not all ID theft is CC theft but I'd guess a lot of it is. Based on friends and family experience getting a CC number stolen every four decades of use passes the smell test so I will go with that. A quote from prweb.com found by google: "Started in 2003, Linode has grown to over 45,000 customers". I wonder what year that quote is from. Still "forty five thousand" is probably not totally ridiculous. It makes sense looking at their hostname scheme, ip space allocations as per whois, and some educated guesses. Lots of people including myself like linode. So assuming the average linode customer is the same as the average joe6pack then 45000/40/365 = about 3 linode customers should get p0wned per day regardless of any linode problem. To make my inner EE happy I'll call the "noise level" about 3/day and evaluate the SNR based on that noise level to see if there's a signal of p0wnership. Obviously the two reports over the course of a couple days is not 100% of all linode customers who got p0wned. But it does show that two reports doesn't really prove anything. Now, as a made up example, 900 reports over 3 days would be a HUGE indicator "something" happened. But at a predicted noise level of about ten or so over three days, two reported is down there in or below the noise. So, as a long term linode customer I'm not freaking out (yet). My CC does email me every time a charge is made, and nothing weird has been seen. All quiet on the western front.
- singlow 14y ago
  Nicely done.

> Various people have reported fraudulent activity on their CCs Most likely not even related

by kbar13 14y ago

> Various people have reported fraudulent activity on their CCs Most likely not even related

prawn 14y ago

I've seen two mentioned in each of two recent Linode threads, potentially the same people. Have there been many more?

VLM 14y ago

Well, lets think about it a bit. It turns out the numbers are ridiculously hard to find although I'm a pretty good searcher/infovore. Better info would be appreciated. Anyway the best I could find was two claims: There were 11 million american victims of identity theft in 2011 (outta 400 million) for a ratio of about 1 in 40 of the general population gets p0wned per year. Obviously not all ID theft is CC theft but I'd guess a lot of it is. Based on friends and family experience getting a CC number stolen every four decades of use passes the smell test so I will go with that. A quote from prweb.com found by google: "Started in 2003, Linode has grown to over 45,000 customers". I wonder what year that quote is from. Still "forty five thousand" is probably not totally ridiculous. It makes sense looking at their hostname scheme, ip space allocations as per whois, and some educated guesses. Lots of people including myself like linode. So assuming the average linode customer is the same as the average joe6pack then 45000/40/365 = about 3 linode customers should get p0wned per day regardless of any linode problem. To make my inner EE happy I'll call the "noise level" about 3/day and evaluate the SNR based on that noise level to see if there's a signal of p0wnership. Obviously the two reports over the course of a couple days is not 100% of all linode customers who got p0wned. But it does show that two reports doesn't really prove anything. Now, as a made up example, 900 reports over 3 days would be a HUGE indicator "something" happened. But at a predicted noise level of about ten or so over three days, two reported is down there in or below the noise. So, as a long term linode customer I'm not freaking out (yet). My CC does email me every time a charge is made, and nothing weird has been seen. All quiet on the western front.

singlow 14y ago
Nicely done.