Brazil's Caixa insurer breach exposes names and tax IDs of all 7.6M customers

(filemanager-cdn.mziq.com)

63 points | by dvaplima 56 minutes ago

7 comments

  • afh1 3 minutes ago
    No financial information leaked, just tax id, which in Brazil nowadays doesn't mean much. There have been more than one high profile website in the past reportedly selling personal data, including tax identifier (CPF), for essentially any Brazilian citizen.

    It is common to be asked for your CPF for trivial things like purchasing anything on a drugstore, and for any and all activity with government branches or banking. This combined with several breaches in government and private institutions in Brazil over the years has made this information essentially public.

    More concerning is when more private information is leaked. For example, police security camera live feed and license plate or CPF-based tracking of anyone was sold online in the past, and have been used by criminal gangs in an attempted murder of a judge: https://www.poder360.com.br/justica/pcc-tinha-acesso-a-siste...

    • yakkomajuri 1 minute ago
      lol I just wrote a comment on this thread 3min ago that says basically the same thing and it's funny how we both structured it the same way:

      Paragraph 1: All CPFs have already leaked

      P2: Even drugstores have your CPF

      P3: The problem is if anything else leaks

      Brazilian groupthink?

  • yakkomajuri 8 minutes ago
    I'm pretty sure at this point every tax ID (CPF) in Brazil is available on a database you can get on the dark web.

    We've had a "CPF-ication" of everything in Brazil over the last few years. The vast majority of people have shared this number with their local grocery store, pharmacy, gym, etc. It's required for a lot of stuff and pretty necessary for others.

    Given that, if that's all that leaked here that's a pretty good outcome. It's sad that I think like this but it's kind of how it is.

    What makes me more pessimistic is that they claim no financial data was exposed but I wonder if that's really true. And that's where the gold is because then scammers know who to target.

  • wolvoleo 16 minutes ago
    Oof. There's a Catalan bank/insurer called la caixa as well, i thought for a moment it was the same company. But appears not.
    • weli 10 minutes ago
      I thought the same for a second. Caixa means box both in catalan and portuguese
  • airstrike 14 minutes ago
    It's important to note the Brazilian tax id (CPF) is not meant to be a well kept secret like the American SSN
  • brunoarueira 25 minutes ago
    The attacks started hitting Brazil, and it'll be really bad! Multiple people that uses Caixa (in general) aren't tech savvy and could be caught by fraudsters more easily.
    • yipinwong 17 minutes ago
      My condolences to you Brazilians.
  • whynotmaybe 24 minutes ago
    > covers all of its 7.6 million active

    How dystopian is it to find reassuring in this situation that a customer doesn't have to wonder whether their data was leaked because it's "all"?

    • zorked 18 minutes ago
      This is a small subset actually as nearly every adult citizen has an account with Caixa.
  • ndbe 16 minutes ago
    [dead]