After seeing their profound incompetence at customer acquisition, ineptitude on the security front is no surprise.
"PayPal has since rolled back the code change responsible for this error, which potentially exposed the PII. We have not delayed this notification as a result of any law enforcement investigation."
That does little to explain the 2 month-ish delay in disclosing it. I presume they could have disclosed _at least_ that account data was leaked even if the underlying bug wasn’t yet closed?
Obviously without disclosing the nature of the bug in that case.
They didn't delay the release because of law enforcement investigation, it doesn't say they didn't delay the release. There's a whole host of reasons besides "law enforcement investigation" to delay an embarrassing release, including "I don't wanna"
The obvious example here would be if the NSA or other agency that isn't law enforcement led the investigation.
But further abuse of the English language reveals a different conclusion. This was not delayed as a result of any law enforcement investigation. It could have been delayed as a result of a specific law enforcement investigation. Furthermore, the word "result" implies that it is tied to the conclusion of said investigation(s). It could in fact have been delayed because of a pending law enforcement investigation.
Lets take the article at face value: "The financial technology company said it has reversed the code change that caused the incident, blocking attackers' access to the data one day after discovering the breach."
Great thats your bug. Key word here being BUG. Your name next to the commit that caused this.
Should you go to prison? Probably not.
Tell me you never had a bug, a security hole, never took production down. Never made a mistake. Tell me that you want to go to jail for human error. Not intent, error.
The rule of the corporate thumbs for several decades now is: it's more profitable to pay a fine then follow the law. (And if congress isn't keeping up with current tech which needs new laws to protect consumers, who cares?)
Lol what an amazing con the oligarchs managed to pull. They get to reap all the rewards of their parasitic selfish behavior with basically none of the risk. Just make a corp.
How tasteful.
That said, I think we need to have an equivalent of automated integration testing for security vulnerabilities.
Even if PenTesters (or whatever they're called these days) do some testing and uncover some bugs, the applications under continuous development will inevitably introduce "bugs" not seen before.
If the government wants to know who I am, that's fine, I'm not here to fight law. I however don't think it should be necessary to tell banks and private businesses where I physically sleep. That is more information than they need to operate, and every few months it seems someone has a data breach.
> In January 2023, PayPal notified customers of another data breach after a large-scale credential stuffing attack compromised 35,000 accounts between December 6 and December 8, 2022.
> Two years later, in January 2025, New York State announced a $2,000,000 settlement with PayPal over charges that it failed to comply with the state's cybersecurity regulations, leading to the 2022 data breach.
I didn't hear about this New York case. I'm the first to lament the incredibly sorry state of affairs of data security, to the extent that such security exists at all, but it is insane that you can get fined $2,000,000 for your customers re-using e-mail + password combinations between sites and becoming compromised as a result. I truly loathe mandatory 2FA with every fiber of my being and I guess New York would like to enforce it on the world? Sigh. Everything about the internet just gets worse and worse, continuously.
- They provide no meaningful consumer protections (since this necessarily requires an authority, which blockchains may not have)
- They don't protect at all against meatspace vulnerabilities like scams and other deception-based attacks, which are by far the more common issue in banking. This is exacerbated by the lack of consumer protections.
(To be clear: don't read my comment as being in support of PayPal. They have abused user trust for a while, and I haven't had an account there in over a year -- fuck 'em.)