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by daltont 887 days ago
Sounds similar to a case where I am from:

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/02/25/turns-out-it-was-actuall...

The "hacking" was decrypting social security numbers from BASE64.

2 comments

Funny message in the encoded Base64 on that article, which reminds me of a musing I had a while back.

Imagine the number of lazy programmers who paste stuff into an online Base64 decoder. Imagine all the stuff that is in those payloads!

Running a site like base64decode.org would be a fantastic honeypot.

That's why many large firms block online code assist tools.
Yeah, this is exactly the case that the headline reminded me of (I got instantly downvoted for commenting about this for some reason). If they had actually encrypted the data it would have been fine, but BASE64 encoding is not encryption. It's trivially easy to decode base64: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Base64#the...